


The Disaster Five

by TNKT



Category: Original Work
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alien Trafficking, Angst, Bad Weather, Blood, Blood Loss, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Blood and Torture, Blood and Violence, Catatonia, Collars, Corpses, Dark Past, Dehumanization, Delayed realization, Escape, Exhaustion, Fear, First Meeting, Gen, Gun Violence, Hallucinations, Hostage Situations, Human Trafficking, Hung by the wrists, Hurt/Comfort, Hypothermia, Illegal Activities, Interrogation, Isolation, Loss of Control, Loss of Faith, Malnutrition, Mental Health Issues, Messy Cleanup, Muzzles, Near Death, Non-Consensual Touching, Past Abuse, Prompt Challenge, Prompt Fill, Prompts Whump, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Rescue, Rescue Missions, Restraints, Scratching, Self-Harm, Selfish, Space Whump, Starvation, Torture, collapse, hidden wound, mental trauma, out in the cold, written out of order but posted chronologically
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:55:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 46,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23377273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TNKT/pseuds/TNKT
Summary: Captain Leonida Trust is sent on a mission with her assigned technician, Private Second Class Arkady Dragunin, to investigate the loss of communication with one of Earth's space colonies co-owned by the people of Ophena. It's difficult enough for both of them to adapt to living in a spaceship, but then it turns out they have to let Ophena's haughty ambassador aboard as well and Grenelant Sell doesn't appreciate these foolhardy humans very much. There's a limit to how many of their reckless endeavours he's willing to follow. Andwhydo they always have to land in the most dire of situations?(Answer: because The Disaster Five were created for the sole purpose of filling whump prompts)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 7
Collections: Prompt Challenge





	1. Prompt List

**Author's Note:**

> Hey pumpkin! This is an original work which I often practice Prompt Challenges with (one of which I started doing with Lokiitama, you can find their own team of whumpees right [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23107672)).

Chapter 2. Captain Leonida Trust  
\- Loss of Control  
\- Messy Cleanup

Chapter 3. Private Dragunin  
\- First Encounter

Chapter 4. Trekking down the Tunnels  
\- Exhaustion  
\- Collapse

Chapter 5. In the Creepy Forest  
\- Delayed Realization  
\- Hidden Wound

Chapter 6. Hostage Situation – Part 1  
\- Isolation  
\- Hostage

Chapter 7. Hostage Situation – Part 2  
\- Hanging by the wrists  
\- Rescue

Chapter 8. Hallucination/Reality  
\- Loss of Faith

Chapter 9. Forgotten Runt  
\- Muzzled

Chapter 10. Poor Thing  
\- Out in the cold

Chapter 11. Intruder Aboard  
\- "Oh good, you've finally arrived. And just in time to watch your little runt die."

Chapter 12. For The Collective Good  
\- Selfish


	2. Captain Leonida Trust

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompts: Loss of Control, Messy Cleanup

"All right, Leonida. Are you ready?"

Leo nodded and held out her arm.

"Go ahead, doc."

"Subject #001, Leonida Trust, 34-year-old female. Test #056 of section #24-12. The goal is the calibration of the assault rifle located in the subject's left forearm. Deploy."

Leo made a fist with her hand and the smooth plates that made up her skin silently slid to the sides. A long metal rod gleamed in the neon lights as it sprang out of cover : the top of a rifle, from the receiver down to the muzzle.

"Load."

This was where the last tests had failed. Leo rotated her fist and felt the bullet click in place inside her arm.

"Hey, it works!" she yelled excitedly.

Doctor Whittler smiled. "Keep it down, Leonida. Now fire."

She pressed the tip of her index against the meat of her thumb and felt the moment the bullet was propelled forward. The force of it made her stumble back and the shot went awry, but the reinforcements beneath her skin and notably of her elbow joint greatly disminished the impact of the recoil on her body.

"Holy shit," she breathed.

"In position," called Doctor Whittler. "Your stance is unsteady, you can do better than that. You trained more than enough for this."

Leo retorted : "Yeah, well receiving the impact from the outside isn't quite the same as receiving it from the inside, now is it doc?" 

She was ready to concede that the force that had been used in training had felt similar, but there was a big difference between stopping an oncoming blow with her palm held straight out and having it directly applied to her joint. 

"How the hell am I supposed to aim steady like this?"

Doctor Whittler sighed. "Training, as always. I'm sure you'll get the hang of it. In position."

Leo complied without grumbling because she was excited to get this to work too. Both women had spent the night perfecting the weapon in her forearm so they'd have conclusive results to show the rest of the team. Doctor Nima and Doctor Rotuje were staring intensely at the scene and Doctor Legain was scribbling away on his little notebook.

"Deploy."

It took reaching test #112 three days later to complete basic calibration of the assault rifle. It took months for Leo to calibrate every part of her body, and a few years to completely master it. _But it was worth it_ , she thought as she ran through enemy fire. She'd finally been deemed efficient enough to be tested directly on the battlefield. She had no breath to lose, and the hammering of her heart was a phantom feeling born from memory alone. Bullets wouldn't wound her like they did regular humans. Leonida was stronger, faster, had superhuman stamina. Like this, she could protect others. 

There were many wounded but no casualties on their side when the battle reached its conclusion. Leo had managed to stop the bleeding for the three most grievous wounds. She was unsure whether the one with the head injury would ever be fit for combat again but he would survive, and for now it was the best anyone could do. She looked herself over. She'd taken a bullet but it hadn't hurt, and all that remained in the point of impact was a small dirty spot on her flank. Even though Leo's resilience to bullets of all kinds had already been tested she was always amazed at the durability of her skin.

Her first trial as an enhanced military fighter was deemed a success, and so she was sent out again. Sometimes she'd be used as backup for her medical abilities, other times as a one-man army. She could fight alongside comrades-in-arms in a warzone in the middle of the day or be part of a stealth unit at night. Leonida Trust's many achievements pushed her up the ranks. Her versatility pleased the higher-ups and the next phase of Project MATES was greenlit whereupon five other subjects began testing and had their body altered in the same way. Things were going smoothly. Then, there was an incident.

"Targets acquired. Give me the all clear."

"All clear."

"All clear."

"All clear."

"Roger," murmured Leo, and she raised both of her folded arms above the pack of dirt she was using as cover. 

One grenade would suffice but she needed to send the second one close after in case the first didn't land true. She focused on the group of three men hidden inside the flimsy shelter and readied her weapons to initiate the process, and then jerked her arms away at the last moment. The first grenade exploded in a huge pile of supplies way off its mark and it took all of Leo's concentration to stop the second from getting launched completely. A cloud of smoke rose from the burning stocks of food and alarmed yells started rising all around the enemy camp.

"What the fuck, Trust!" Werner's shout crackled on the radio.

Leo cursed. Two women and their kids had appeared at the window just as she'd triggered the launch and her reflexes had taken over to avoid killing them. She'd made a worthless mistake and they'd lost the element of surprise as a result.

"Shoot before they move out!" yelled Mullins.

"Too late," Cantrell cut in. "They're dispersing."

"Move in, move in!" Leo barked, grabbing her rifle and jumping over the dirt mound.

Her legs propelled her forwards at a vehicle's speed and she was the first to get into shooting distance of her targets. She lifted up her firearm and pulled the trigger, shooting down one of the enemy leaders and catching another in the leg. Leo heard a woman's scream and children crying and calling for their mother. Her head whipped around and she saw that one of the women had been gunned down, and more men were coming out of the three surrounding shelters with aggressive shouting. She recognized Mullins and Cantrell standing a few yards away and had the time to see Werner chasing after one of the fleeing targets before something heavily collided with her back and she was thrown through the walls of the nearest hut. Only one coherent thought had the time to form in her mind while she was airborne, which was that whatever had hit her must've been pretty powerful to have sent her flying like this. Then she landed and smacked her head against the ground hard enough that the world flickered. Something above her elbow clicked almost simultaneously and she heard something metallic violently ricochet against the cracked earth a few feet away. Leo's eyes widened in the second it took her to realize that the control she'd had over her systems had just faltered in the moment she'd been stunned. She opened her mouth to scream a warning.

The explosion threw the sound of her voice into oblivion and she was blasted back, her body thrown across the ground and hit by flying debris. She rolled to a stop, ears ringing, head throbbing. Her face and hands burned and she was dazed for several seconds, trying to pull herself up and squinting at her surroundings. There were muffled sounds of fire around her, crackling and shooting, and she could guess that she'd probably gotten rammed into by the armored vehicle that was stopped in the exact spot she'd been standing in just a minute ago. Leo quickly got back to her feet. She'd let go of her rifle but that didn't matter. Recovery was easier for her than it was for her human comrades and she lifted her right arm to shoot at the nearby enemies that were still standing. Leo saw the way their eyes widened when they realized the weapon was in her arm and that she wasn't getting wounded by the bullets they retaliated with; she was used to it, and she knew to duck just as they got the idea to shoot her in the head instead. They were too slow for her, she knew the way they'd react, had seen it countless times before. 

"Fuck, Trust, what did you _do?!_ " bellowed Werner from the side. He must've been closer than she'd thought, or maybe she'd been thrown in his direction by the blast.

"Shut up and stay alive!" she yelled back. Neither Cantrell nor Mullins were saying anything but it was hard to hear anything above the gunfire in her ears.

The grenade had wiped out nearly half the enemies when it had landed right in the middle of the small camp and incapacitating the rest took less than ten minutes. The harsh strafing fell away and was replaced by the softer sounds of human agony. Moaning, cursing, sobbing floated over the scene as blood spilled and spread out in puddles. Leo stared at the havoc they'd wreaked. Werner ran past her to one of the bodies laying on the ground.

"Shit. Shit! Miles! _Miles!_ "

Leonida followed him on autopilot and saw Cantrell laying bloodied in Werner's arms. She knew it was Cantrell, not from his face which was so mangled it was unrecognizable nor from his tall stature which was missing a leg; she knew it was him because one of his hands was half-open and his fingers limply curled around the the lucky charm he carried around in the crude shape of a four-leaved clover made out of clay. Leo knew it was so unrefined because a child had made it, because Cantrell had told them all during an evening they'd been allowed to relax and learn more about each other. Leonida had seen her fair share of dead bodies and lost many friends in battle and it never got easier.

"Fuck," Werned cursed in a choked voice. "He's _dead._ "

Leonida looked around to find Mullins but there was nothing, not a single distinctive sign that could tell her which of the bodies on the ground belonged to the soldier.

"Mullins!" she cried out.

No answer.

"He got shot just before you threw that grenade," quietly said Werner. He laid Cantrell back down to the ground and got to his feet. "Fucking hell, Trust, what the hell were you _thinking?_ "

Leonida stared at him. "Can you confirm the death of the target you were after?"

Werner's face slackened in disbelief, and then he roared: " _You killed Cantrell!_ "

"Yes, and Mullins is my fault as well. This is all my responsability," she flatly answered. She could tell from Werner's reaction that there was no target left to terminate but she still needed to make sure. "This is an order as your superior: confirm the kill, Sergeant Werner."

The man stared at her in horrified incredulity and eventually nodded. "Yeah, I... Yeah. He's dead. His body's over there."

Leo marched in the direction he'd pointed her to and found the target with three holes in his chest. He wasn't breathing. She then made her way across the battlefield to check the numerous bodies, kicking away the weapons that were too close to hostile hands, blocking out the sounds of children crying over their parents' bodies, and found her two targets dead as well. She also found Mullins' corpse riddled with bullets in the process. 

Leo knew she'd caused this mass murder by not going through with launching the grenades at the three leaders when they'd been gathered in one spot. She knew Mullins wouldn't have died if she'd done her part of the mission correctly, so that they could've retreated afterwards like they'd meant to do. She knew it was her weapon that had directly caused the disfigurement and death of Miles Cantrell. They'd all known there was always a possibility to die in battle, but not like this. Not by friendly fire, not at the hands of a companion.

She turned to Werner, feeling nothing but cold and empty. "We have to clean up this place."

Werner was still staring at her with wide eyes that were equally revulsed and aghast. He was staring at her like he wasn't facing his captain, like he wasn't facing the talented and charismatic Leonida Trust, but a monster he'd never known existed until now. Sometimes Leonida really felt the part. She gestured to Cantrell.

"I'll handle him and Mullins if that makes it easier for you. You know what to do with the rest."

Werner's gaze flickered to the bodies that had now all ceased moving entirely. The scene felt surreal, two individuals standing nearly unharmed in the middle of a sea of blood, gore and corpses. Their unit often did dirty work but they were good at what they did and it had never gotten this bad. Now they weren't a unit anymore, just an unsteady half that would probably be pulled apart as soon as they returned to make their report.

The man pulled himself together with visible effort and gave a curt nod. "Yes, Captain."

He walked off to start picking up the enemies' weapons and Leonida searched for Cantrell's missing limb. Her feet squelched in the spots where blood mixed with earth that wasn't quite as dry to form red mud, and small pieces of flesh stuck to her shoes and clothes. Maybe some of it was Cantrell's. Leo felt a strong wave of disgust towards the slick mess of human matter on and around her and most of all towards herself. She ragingly swiped at her clothes with hands that stung from the burns the explosion had inflicted her skin and shook them free of the cold, gunky bits. As she continued searching her gaze then landed on a limb covered in soiled fabric, the bone jaggedly cut where it had been torn away. The dirt around it was streaked with blood. Leonida forced herself to come closer and crouched next to it. The hands that reached out to pick up the leg didn't feel like they belonged to her.

Leo carried it back to Cantrell and pulled up the soldier's body as well- careful to slip the clay clover in her own suit compartment first so that it wouldn't get lost- and dragged what had once been a friendly, calm and appreciated individual all the way back to where they'd left their vehicle. She gently laid Cantrell's body down and gazed at the flayed face. One of his eyes had been gouged out by the shrapnel.

"I'm sorry," she whispered to him. She felt so empty. There were a lot of things she wanted to tell him but it was all useless, and she wouldn't have expected him to be willing to listen even if he was hanging around as a ghost. She'd killed him. It had been an accident, but she'd killed him. In the end she just repeated: "I'm sorry."

And then she turned back around to go get Mullins' body, as well. She didn't speak again. By the time she'd wrapped both bodies in a tarpaulin, pushed them in the back of the vehicle and joined up with Werner, he'd gathered eight of the twenty-seven corpses on the edge of the camp. Leonida helped with the rest, dragging the red oozing bodies across the earth and painting it with large irregular strokes of crimson. The children seemed to have all been spared and they were huddled around the surviving woman, all of them silent and wide-eyed. The clean up was very quiet. Grim, tedious, messy, and quiet.

Werner and Leonida left the place while it was still night. The desperate screaming had started up again, but it was feeble against the roar of the huge fire at their back. The air smelled like burning meat and hair. The stench clung to their clothes and gear and the vehicle was already filled with death when they got in. They didn't talk to each other, didn't look at each other. Leo apologized one last time as she drove her men back to the base. Werner looked outside the window and didn't answer.

Werner's testimony was in accordance with hers and it lead to the questioning of how far emotion and doubt could compromise a human weapon's efficiency. Up until now Leo's many successes had allowed the Project MATES team to push back these concerns, but her mistake was the first step of its gradual downfall. There was another incident two months later when one of the subjects accidentally discharged in Doctor Rotuje's stomach. Then a scandal involving Doctor Nima and unethical experiments exploded, and the researcher disappeared. With two of its head researchers missing and problems coming up one after the other, Project MATES lost fundings and was finally dropped in favor of continuing the development of android fighters instead. Leonida was still a MATES and so were the other subjects that had agreed to undergo the enhancement process, and it wasn't like they could go back to what they'd been before. They were kept in the army, each of them was assigned a military technician for repairs and reports who they were told they'd have to lug around for the foreseeable future, and soon after they were all sent on their respective missions.

This was how Leonida jump-started the fall of a billion-dollar worth project, fucked up her mental state even further, met the prickly Arkady Dragunin, and ended up getting sent to space alone with the guy.


	3. Private Dragunin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: First Encounter

"In case you haven't noticed, Doc, I was a direct participant in creating and calibrating my body."

Doctor Whittler chuckled to herself. "Yes, I did notice, especially the times when you went and undid my modifications without my say-so or consent because you thought yours were better."

"They totally were," said Leo. "Look, I don't need a techie, I can handle myself just fine. I've been doing most repairs by myself."

"Exactly, _most_ ," said the doctor as she pulled open the door to the building to let Leo walk through. "There are some you can't do alone and it would be especially dangerous to leave you by yourself while you're stranded in space. Why are you so against the idea of having a person to help you?"

"Techies are really pushy. This one time I asked for cool knee guards, right, and I told them I didn't like the square shapes. They pulled a face like I was spitting in their soup. They insisted the ugly, chunky ones were optimal."

"You tried to force them to change everything after they were done with their work, of course they'd be annoyed," Doctor Whittler reminded her.

"Well they should've listened to my first request! I'm the one who's gotta live with those knee guards," grumbled Leo.

"Whatever the case, you don't have a choice in the matter. You've pushed back getting your assigned technician long enough, everyone else has one."

"Yeah, I know."

"I'm sure you'll make friends with them. You're going to spend some time up in space alone after all."

"Tell me about it." Leo stepped forward, holding the door open for the doctor this time. "It's cool to be a part of this but I also would rather stay on Earth."

"That's completely understandable. How's Jay doing, by the way?"

Leo made a face. "Sad that I'm leaving. I am too, obviously, but I try to be cheerful when we're together. It would be the worst if we both moped around until it was time for me to go."

Leonida had been mandated to investigate the disappearance of the network signal on the Kautauri belt, one of Earth's smallest space colonies which was co-owned with the Ophena planet's government. It had gone completely silent just under a week ago. Signals were ingoing but never outgoing, and when Earth had contacted Ophena about this matter it had turned out that they had the exact same problem. It had been decided that the infamous Captain Leonida Trust would be able to handle this situation. All she had to do was go there with Ophena's ambassador, check and report what was going on, and eventually serve as Earth's representative herself in any of the decisions the government of Ophena and Kautauri would take to fix the issue. Stealth was an important part of her mission if things ended up being dangerous and Leonida had the order to turn back and call for backup in that scenario; she was basically going to scout out the situation, which was one of the reasons Earth and Ophena were only sending out one common ship. Another reason was that the Kautauri colony wasn't the most important prospect for either planets so they couldn't really be assed to send out more people unless the situation was dire enough to officially require a whole fleet for backup.

Doctor Whittler threw her a compassionate glance. "I'm sorry this had to happen right before your party."

"So am I," sighed Leo. "I was looking forward to it, too, but I guess it'll be for another time. At least it was a surprise so there's no big disappointment for Jay. Still sucks."

"Yes."

"I'll try to celebrate it just the two of us even if we'll probably not be in the best of moods. I'm probably gonna cry at one point. Jay too, I'm pretty sure. I'll send updates of my trip so we won't feel so alone once I'm away."

"How long will it be?"

"Well, obviously you know what they calculated, a few months at best and a lot of them at worst. Honestly, I think I could get us to the colony fast enough. It's how long I'll have to stay there that's vague since I might have to stay and fix things for a while."

"I hope not, for your sake."

"Yep. But hey, at least I get to meet people from another planet. Apparently Ophena's ambassador is a giant frog, how cool is that?"

Doctor Whittler smiled. She always smiled when Leo got excited. "Pretty cool, I'd say."

"Right?"

Doctor Whittler walked up to a pair of heavyset doors and paused before pushing them open. "All right, we're here. Ready? This is an important choice so we have to be serious about it."

Leonida drew her shoulders back in a picture of professional authority and grinned at her. "When am I ever not?"

They walked in the room and were greeted by two officials, a short stocky brown-haired woman with impassive gray eyes and a tall blonde man who warmly smiled at them and shook their hands.

"Captain Trust, Doctor Whittler. I am Staff Sergeant Graham and this is Corporal Lloyd." The woman at his side nodded a salute, and he continued speaking. "We were informed that you were coming so you'd be assigned a private technician, and we've selected the eight best elements from our Advanced Engineering and Technology Program so you could make your choice. Corporal Lloyd will assist you, as she talks to these men on a daily basis, while I will oversee the exchange."

"Sounds good to me, Sergeant," said Leo.

"Please lead the way," Doctor Whittler said.

They followed the pair deeper inside the building and were lead to yet another room where Leo counted about twenty soldiers at one glance. A few of them lifted their gaze up from the small mechanical contraptions they'd been working on to curiously eye the four of them until Corporal Lloyd curtly said: "Back to work."

They quickly complied and Sergeant Graham said: "Privates Colm Price, Arkady Dragunin, Eathen O'Doherty, Bret Hardin, River Weston, Samuel Delacruz, Keelan Simon, Rohaan Mays, stop what you're doing and listen up."

The men all looked up- almost all of them.

"Dragunin," sharply called Coporal Lloyd.

One of the soldiers belligerently looked up from his work as if he would've much preferred to focus on his project than to even care about any of this. He didn't look at Leo nor at Doctor Whittler. There was a sudden tension in the air between the private and his corporal and Leo sensed there was history there. Private Dragunin was possibly a conceited jerk or a fellow rulebreaker. Maybe both.

Sergeant Graham graciously ignored what was happening. "This is Captain Leonida Trust, first of the five mechanically and technologically enhanced soldiers, and Doctor Whittler, one of the head researchers in the MATES project. They're looking for a personal technician who will be assigned to Captain Trust for an indefinite period of time as well as on a reconnaissance mission in outer space. For those who might've heard of it, it's the operation meant to recover communication with the Katauri belt."

The soldiers' eyes lit up and those who hadn't been called upon still glanced at Doctor Whittler and Leonida despite their orders to focus. Either they were an unruly bunch, either both women's appearance in this place was a bigger deal than Leo had perceived it to be. These soldiers were in engineering, after all, so they were bound to be interested in technological prowess. The rebellious Dragunin also turned his gaze on them and now seemed just as fascinated as his peers.

"The eight of you will pass an interview with both of them so they can decide who they would like to choose as the captain's assigned technician."

Gazes lingered on Leonida as Sergeant Graham finished explaining what the interview would consist in, and then they stepped in the room next door to start the process. Sergeant Graham didn't say much but Corporal Lloyd gave her recommandations from the start, informing both the captain and the doctor that O'Doherty and Mays had always presented remarkable success rates and intelligence far superior to the rest of the class. Leonida only paid attention to the first and fourth interviews. Colm Price seemed like a calm and level-headed man whose specialty lied more on the medical side of engineering and he reminded her a bit of Cantrell, which was what caught her attention. She was in a rather pensive state during O'Doherty and Simon's interviews, and then Dragunin walked in. Now that he was standing so close, she could tell that he was a bit younger than the guys before him. Twenties, maybe? He had short brown hair but everything else about him was pale, which was why she was quick to notice the thin smattering of dark freckles across the bridge of his nose. The soldier was lean and tense, brows slightly furrowed. Probably out of stress, thought Leo. They'd all seemed a bit nervous and impressed by her presence- the appearance of one of the MATES experiments on this day in their lives probably really _was_ something huge for them. Doctor Whittler kept saying Leonida didn't really give herself enough credit for what she was. 

Dragunin wasn't nearly as talkative as the O'Doherty genius, and he never smiled which was completely contrary to Simon's easy charm. He didn't just look tense, he looked wary, and his eyes weren't always trained on Leonida and Doctor Whittler like the others' had been. He was watchful of all the reactions in the room and that included Corporal Lloyd's and Sergeant Graham's.

Dragunin's specialty was building weapons. He wasn't very expansive on his knowledge and abilities during the interview and Leo felt like he wasn't actively trying to show off his skills, even though it was obvious he was interested in her and Doctor Whittler. A reserved rulebreaker, then? Curious.

Leo leaned forward and said: "How confident are you in your skills of technician? Would you be able to pull it off if you had to modify some aspects of our ship without guidance?"

"I'm positive I could, as long as I was allowed to study all of its blueprints," he answered with no hesitation. Arkady Dragunin had an accent which Leo couldn't place because it was so faint.

"Would you feel the same confidence in repairing me if the need arose?"

"Yes, with the same condition as for the ship. I can adapt to new technology and build whatever you need me to as long as I've aquired the basics."

Leonida looked down at the details of Dragunin's file. His scores corroborated with his self-proclaimed versatility, though he did have several weak points like in the medical and linguistic domains. She found it very interesting that Dragunin's best talents resided in combat engineering, notably explosives and fortifications, as well as in armament engineering. This mission wasn't supposed to require firepower but Leo rather enjoyed the prospect of talking with someone who shared her interests.

She looked back up and said: "If you did end up coming with me, we'd be stuck in space for a while. It might be a lot longer than just a few months. Do you still want to play a role in this mission knowing this?"

Dragunin's gaze flickered to the left, in the direction of the Corporal and the Sergeant, and his jaw was set when he answered without looking at her: "Definitely."

"Private Dragunin," said Leonida, authority slipping into her voice just as years of experience as a higher-ranking individual had taught her to speak. "The one deciding your future right now is me, not your Staff Sergeant nor your Corporal. Look at me when you answer."

Dragunin's clear gaze sharply returned to her and he curtly nodded. "Apologies, Captain. Yes, I want to be a part of this regardless of how long the mission will last."

"Okay," said Leo. "That's all for me. Doc?"

Doctor Whittler gazed at her and then at the soldier. "That's all for me as well."

"Dismissed," dryly said Corporal Lloyd. "Get back to work."

Dragunin glared at her, clearly rankled by her tone, and he saluted both of the women in front of him before leaving. Reserved maybe, but Dragunin wasn't shy, not with the way he openly glared at his Corporal. Leonida was really curious now about the situation between the two. She was distracted after that, focusing on Corporal Lloyd more than she did on the other soldiers. The woman wasn't expressive at all so it was difficult to know what she was thinking. One thing was for sure, however, and it was that her tone of voice was not once as severe with the rest of the soldiers as it had been with Arkady Dragunin.

The door closed on River Weston, the last soldier to be interviewed, and Leo leaned back in her chair to say: "So, Doc?"

"I'm having a hard time deciding between Rohan Mays and Keelan Simon. What about you?"

"Dragunin," said Leonida with no hesitation. Corporal Lloyd blinked, expressionless as ever, and Sergeant Graham looked a bit surprised.

Doctor Whittler frowned at her. "He barely talked compared to the others."

"Don't you think his name is cool? Dragunin. It has a nice ring to it. You think it means dragon in some other language?"

" _Really?_ Leonida, this isn't just a matter of cool names!" exclaimed the exasperated doctor.

"If I may," intervened Corporal Lloyd, "Arkady Dragunin's teamwork is lacking and as I've stated before, there are brighter recruits among those we've presented to you."

Leonida leveled a keen gaze at her. "He's part of your _eight best elements_."

"High scores resulting from a good understanding of engineering do not always equate sufficient wits out on the field," steadily replied the corporal.

It sounded like a load of bullshit and Leonida crossed her arms over her chest, deciding she really didn't like Corporal Lloyd very much. "What's the purpose of allowing him to be part of this process then, Corporal, if you didn't want him to be chosen as my technician?"

The woman's brow creased ever so slightly. She definitely seemed like the type to hate getting challenged regardless of hierarchy. 

"You already made your recommendations earlier, Corporal Lloyd," intervened Sergeant Graham. "It's up to Captain Trust and Doctor Whittler to make their choice now."

Corporal Lloyd nodded shortly and fell silent. She could have been pointing out Arkady Dragunin's weak spots because she genuinely wanted Leonida to choose a more talented individual to accompany her on her trip to outer space, but the way she'd singled out the soldier felt more gratuitously demeaning than concerned. 

Doctor Whittler looked at the three of them and said: "Corporal Lloyd knows these people best, Leonida. Don't you think we should trust her judgment?"

"I also like to think I can trust my own judgment, Doc. If he's in this program and among those with the best scores, then he's more than qualified for this operation, isn't he? You're asking me to choose the best of the best but I don't need the best of the best. I just need someone who knows what they're doing and I want someone who won't bore me when it's just the two of us stuck in a ship thousands of miles away from Earth. Private Dragunin seems to fit the bill."

"You always did have a soft spot for weapon building so I'm not surprised you'd want to get to know someone whose specialty is exactly that," reluctantly said Doctor Whittler. Then she let out a soft sigh. "Well, you're the one this choice is up to, ultimately. I told you what I thought."

"Yes, and thanks, but I'm not changing my mind." Leo looked at the Sergeant and Corporal. "I've made my choice. It'll be Dragunin."

They headed back outside in the room of soldiers. Corporal Lloyd stood next to her sergeant and with her legs firmly planted apart in front of them all, she declared: "Captain Trust has decided that Private Arkady Dragunin would be her assigned technician. Follow them, Private."

Heads turned in the stunned soldier's direction and Leonida felt a chill in the room. She'd expected jealousy to some degree because of how eager they'd all seemed to meet her, but she'd also expected some sort of celebratory atmosphere. During her time as a Private, her fellow crewmates had been happy for her when she'd gotten promoted. This was different. The air was oddly tense and the faces surrounding Dragunin were dark.

 _Looks like I might've picked the problem child_ , she thought to herself.

And then, just like that, smiles appeared all around and some words of congratulations were said to Dragunin as he started making his way to the front of the room. Someone even patted him on the back and Leonida caught the way he tensed up. Yep, probably the systematic bullied recruit. Leo didn't like that this was a thing in the army but she'd been unable to stop it in her division back in the day and she'd long since given up on trying to make herself heard on the subject. Even if she was pulling this one out of the fire, another one would take his place. It was disheartening and Leo didn't linger on disheartening thoughts, so instead she smiled brightly at Dragunin and clapped him on the shoulder. He was shorter than her and the height difference made the gesture easy. 

"Congrats, Private. We're going space-travelling together."

His eyes briefly flickered down to her hand first, and then he looked at her face and very seriously said: "Thank you for giving me this opportunity."

She stuck out her hand. "Might as well introduce ourselves correctly. The name's Leonida Trust." 

His was a bit smaller but his grip was very firm. "Arkady Dragunin."

In an entirely meddlesome afterthought, she added: "It's nice to meet you. Or as they say in Italy, piacere di conoscerti." She let her sentence end on an inquisitive note, hoping he'd get it.

The look in his eyes lightened a bit and his lips slanted in some sort of half-smile which kinda made it look like he wasn't used to doing that all that much. "Priyátno poznakómit'sya, Captain Trust."

Great, so he could read between the lines. Leonida squinted a bit. "Is that Russian?"

"It is."

"Still got it," she beamed. "By the way, since we're going to be hanging out 24/7, you can drop the Captain Trust and call me Leonida."

"That'll take some getting used to, sir," he told her. He sounded somewhat cautious.

She laughed to put him at ease. "Sure thing, Arkady."

"Leonida!" Doctor Whittler called out as she motioned for them to come closer, which distracted Leo long enough that she didn't notice the way the soldier's shoulders had stiffened. 

She turned back to him and gestured towards the doctor. "Come on, we're going to tell the higher-ups about your new position before we get to the interesting part."

Arkady didn't say anything when he followed her.

Leo had wanted to promptly expedite the meeting with her superior but Major Arthur Cantrell had apparently decided to spell out the expansive list of their duties on this mission to both her and Arkady. The major didn't hate Leonida for allowing his nephew to die out on the field but he'd definitely stopped appreciating her existence since then. Leo, for her part, didn't like getting reminded of Miles, but that was something she had little chance of avoiding since she often had to refer to Major Cantrell whenever she was done with one of her missions. He was also implicated in the MATES project and had a hand in overlooking its five elements. None of the other MATES were as highly ranked as Leonida so she was unfortunately the one who met up with the major most frequently. 

Doctor Whittler was there too. She could've gone back to the lab but had insisted on assisting to yet another debrief about the Katauri belt communication operation with Leonida. They sat around the table in the clean, wide room as Major Cantrell explained all over again what the operation would consist in. Granted, there were some added details about the giant frog ambassador's species, but Leo was bored and she figured that if she needed to know more about it she'd just ask it directly. She was pretty sure human knowledge of opiels wasn't as trustworthy as opiels' own knowledge about themselves. Leo took advantage of the debrief to cast side glances in Arkady Dragunin's direction. He looked very focused on what Major Cantrell was saying, so that was good. Leonida knew she tended to be a bit air-headed herself at times and that a serious subordinate was a good way to balance it out. That was how she'd worked so well with Warren Mullins and David Werner back when they'd formed a small, cohesive special ops unit with Miles Cantrell. She just hoped Arkady was less of a party pooper than Warren had been, God rest his soul.

"This concludes my presentation. Do you have any questions?" asked Major Cantrell, his dry voice pulling Leonida back to the present. She just shook her head without saying anything but Arkady spoke up.

"Sir, one technician for a whole ship's maintenance seems a bit short, especially when it's meant to hold a crew of four."

Major Cantrell studied him. "You come from the Advanced Engineering and Technology Program, correct?"

"Yessir."

"I was assured that a single element from that course would be enough for this mission. Are you telling me you're feeling overwhelmed by the responsability your superiors have elected you to carry?" Major Cantrell looked at Leonida. "Or that maybe Captain Trust hasn't made the right call by choosing you?"

Arkady's blue eyes had turned wary and his gaze quickly flickered in Leonida's direction before returning to the major. "No, sir. It was just something I wanted to point out."

Major Cantrell turned his attention back to Arkady. "Your remark has been acknowledged, Private. Now is there anything about this mission you believe you might be unqualified for?"

"No, sir." Arkady's voice was steady but he sounded a bit resentful.

"Good. Then if there are no other observations, this meeting is adjourned." Major Cantrell turned off the projection and retrieved his identification badge from the computer, and before leaving he said in the exact same level tone he'd used during the presentation: "And Captain Trust? Do try keeping your subordinate alive."

Well, maybe Major Cantrell hated her a little.

After that, Doctor Whittler lead Arkady and Leonida to one of the lab rooms so she could show him the blueprints for Leonida's body and teach him the basics of what he needed to know about it. Doctor Whittler intended to give him several lessons and chances to practice before they were due for their departure from Earth. Arkady looked kind of conflicted between looking impressed by the intricate technology of Leonida's body and keeping a neutral expression, and he even looked somewhat wary of Leonida herself. Leo didn't know what she'd done to make him uneasy in any way, but Arkady's caution was there and unmistakable. Maybe it had something to do with the way he'd been treated by his corporal. Arkady was absolutely not an asslicker, that much was clear, but he did seem to hold hierarchy pretty close to his heart.

Doctor Whittler had started by explaining what Leonida's blood was made of and how Arkady would have to ensure that it flowed seamlessly through vessels and additional circuits, but Leonida was already growing impatient.

"Doc, drop the boring science talk, I want him to see all the cool stuff I have," she interrupted.

Doctor Whittler shot her a look and then sighed. "Fine, Leonida. Go ahead and show off."

Leo grinned at Arkady. "Ready?"

Arkady uncertainly stared at her and then shuffled slightly backwards like he expected her to explode. "Ready for what, Captain?"

"For this!" exclaimed Leo, and she let all her compartments slide open at once.

Arkady's pale eyes widened when he saw the arsenal she always carried with her and let out a short: "Chert voz'mi." From the sound of his voice, it probably meant something along the lines of 'holy shit'. He passed his hair through his short brown hair in incredulous awe which he couldn't hide when he looked at the two women to ask: "And there's no risk for any of that to get set off without the captain's control?"

Leonida and Doctor Whittler glanced at each other, and the doctor said: "No. There were some hiccups in earlier stages of development but we've made sure it would never happen again."

Arkady didn't notice their silent exchange. He was leaning in closer to Leonida, fascinated, all prior caution forgotten as he read out the labels on the four canisters positioned in a square at her midsection. "Tear gas, oxygen. What are the two at the back?"

"Anesthetic and fuel."

"What kind of fuel?"

"Flamethrower fuel."

Arkady's head snapped up in disbelief. "You have a _flamethrower?_ "

"This baby right here." Leonida waved her left arm.

"This is insane," murmured Arkady.

"Pretty damn cool if you ask me," smugly said Leonida. "I've got a built-in transmitter, LRAD, first aid supplies, ammo, you name it."

Arkady glanced downwards. "What about your lower legs?"

"They're reinforced to enhance my fighting ability. I pack quite a kick," said Leo with a wink.

Doctor Whittler let Leonida boast for ten more minutes, which was longer than she would've usually allowed and Leo suspected it was because she was just as intrigued as her to see Arkady act so openly interested about something. He'd seemed very stoic and sullen up until now. His excitement right now still looked a bit restrained but it was clearly because he couldn't help that it was showing in the first place. Leo determined that those excellent grades of his in weapon-related courses hadn't been a fluke, and that Arkady really was passionate about this kind of thing. 

Then once Doctor Whittler and Arkady had gone over the basics of a MATES' maintenance, the technician had to leave to get a look into the ship he'd have to take care of for the forseeable future. Leonida had gotten her information on it already and this was a deeper analysis of the ship she didn't think she'd need to know, but she went anyway, just in case. Having a technician was probably handy and she knew to delegate duties but she liked to be able to rely on herself just as well. When Arkady noticed that she was coming with him, he threw her an odd look but didn't comment. His careful enthusiasm had faded as soon as Doctor Whittler's lesson had ended and he was back to his sour-faced, quiet, wary demeanor.

Arkady only stayed in Leonida's vicinity when they were both listening to the ship guide and as soon as he was allowed to check the ship by himself, Arkady strayed away from her. One moment he was right there looking at the fixtures between the wall panels, the next he was gone from the room. Leo tried to find him but there were many possible spots he could've retreated to and maybe he just needed some time to himself after this recent change of positions, so in the end she just left.

Only, it turned out Arkady seemed to need a lot of time to himself even in the days that followed. Leonida didn't cross paths with him as often as she'd thought she would and she was rather busy herself with planning out the route of their space trip, adjusting contingency plans, testing communication devices, talking with her superiors, and barely finding any time for evenings with a downtrodden and slightly resentful J. It wasn't easy seeing her _caro_ so sad to see her leave, especially since Leo wanted nothing more but to stay home so they could be together all day until she had to go but couldn't allow herself to because of her obligations. When Leo's lips started wobbling and her brow creased during dinner on the third day of the week, J teared up in turn, and they ended up spending the whole evening cuddling on the couch in front of Leo's favorite movie eating their emergency supply of junk food. It wasn't sexy, but it was as much comfort as they could get in their respective states.

Leo and Arkady did both have High-G training at the same time and they did both meet up with Doctor Whittler to continue Arkady's formation and check for any last-minute necessary updates to Leonida's systems, but the technician never followed Leonida and Doctor Whittler in the more personal conversations. He remained professional when he talked and was engrossed in understanding her components the rest of the time. Leonida was starting to fear that he'd be less entertaining than she'd given him credit for when they'd be in space together, but the other part of her could tell something was up. Arkady continued side-eyeing her like he expected her to do something and Leonida still didn't know what it was exactly. She wondered if Arkady would have behaved differently with her had she not been his superior.

It was two days before the launch when Leonida went to triple-check that the ship had enough of her spare parts in her assigned containers, and she found Arkady in one of the open rooms while she was walking down the hallway. The young man was in a plain grey tank top and faded orange coveralls which were tied at his waist by the sleeves, and he was crouching close to the ground with his arms reaching out into a hole where he'd pried away a section of the wall to see the electrical wiring behind it. It didn't look like he'd heard her approaching, which wasn't that surprising considering Leonida's steps were always very quiet. The doors automatically closed behind her when she walked into the room and that was the moment Arkady realized he wasn't alone anymore. He whirled around and saw her coming closer.

"Hey, Arkady," Leo said with a smile. "What are you doing here all alone?"

He didn't smile back, of course, only vaguely gestured towards the hole. "I'm looking over the ship's electrical grid to check that the doors are all wired right."

Leonida stopped next to him. Arkady didn't budge and kept staring up at her. 

She asked: "Is this what you've been doing lately? Checking on the ship by yourself?"

"Yes. I want to make sure I know it in its entirety before we leave Earth."

"About that. We're going to leave Earth in two days, don't you want to hang out with people a bit more before we're stuck in space? Whenever I ask others where you are they say they almost never see you."

"I'm fine the way I am," answered Arkady.

"Hm," thoughtfully hummed Leo. Then she asked: "Are you the kind of guy who doesn't like people?"

"...I don't _dislike_ people."

Leo waited for him to continue, but instead Arkady just kept tinkering with the grid. She would've thought that maybe this was a sore subject if not for the fact that every subject she tried to broach seemed sore with the way Arkady reacted to her questions. She ventured: "Any family to see, then?"

"Not in these parts."

"Oh, okay. That's unfortunate." 

Another silence. Leo wondered, again, why Arkady always behaved so aloof despite saying that he wanted to come on this space trip with her. He'd looked determined to be a part of this operation during his interview. As she watched his back, she found it looked more lonely than hostile. Maybe he was stressed by the prospect of leaving Earth and this was how he reacted when faced with stress, distancing himself from everything that reminded him that he was, in fact, leaving Earth for months without knowing exactly when he'd return. Maybe he wasn't as unfazed as he seemed to be. Had he even taken the time to enjoy the stuff on Earth that he'd surely miss out there, once they were far from home? Maybe he didn't know how. After all, he'd recently been pulled out of that engineering division and had been mostly left to his own devices since then, and Leo knew for a fact it felt weird to suddenly not have any more orders to follow at every hour of the day. Leo decided she might as well try to convince him to go out to that bar she and the others had planned on visiting, see if she could get him to loosen up a little for once in his life.

"Hey, Arkady? The guys wanted to go out tonight. Do you think you'd be interested?"

There was a very short sigh which Leo probably wouldn't have heard had she been a regular human, and then Arkady pulled away from the hole in the wall, leaned back on his heels and shot her a heavy look. "Captain Trust, I need to focus on my work. I know you probably think that I could be doing better things than spending all my time here but I don't want to take any chances with this ship, especially since I'll be the only one fixing it."

Unfortunately for grumpypants there, Leonida wasn't one to give up so easily. "Come on, Arkady. I'm not the only one who'd like to get to know you better." She crouched next to him and settled a hand on his shoulder with a teasing grin on her lips. "Are we not good enough for your company?"

Her hand could have burnt Arkady through his clothes and his reaction would've been just as instant. His eyes widened at first and then he shot up and away from her, words spilling out of his contorted lips like a snarl. "Don't get too familiar with me, Captain."

Leonida lifted both hands in the air, surprised by his sudden aggressiveness. "Woah, calm down! What's the matter?"

Arkady glared at her like he was trying to see through her. "Why do you want me to hang out with you people?"

"Hey, it was just a suggestion. I thought we could try and be friends, you know? No need to get so angry over it. "

"Don't get the wrong idea. We're nothing else than subordinate and superior," curtly said Arkady.

Leo frowned. "Seriously?"

"Yes, Captain Trust. Seriously. If there was nothing else you wanted from me then let me continue my work."

 _Captain Trust._ Arkady had told her it would be difficult for him to get used to calling her by her first name, and in fact, he'd never once done it since she'd told him to. She stared at him some more and then moved to get up. Leonida noticed the way Arkady stepped back when she did this so she slowed down her movements, puzzled by the man's distrustful attitude. "Well... Okay then. Jeez, I don't know what's wrong with you but there are nicer ways to say you want to be left alone."

A muscle in Arkady's clenched jaw jumped and he retorted: "People like you don't seem to understand nicer refusals."

"People like me?" echoed Leonida, feeling somewhat offended but mostly very confused. Her technician's behavior had just undergone a whiplash change from kind of cold to straight-up rude and she had no idea what had set this off. She hadn't been even been mean to him.

"Nevermind." Arkady's voice was bitter. "Are you going to leave?"

Leonida put a hand on her plating-clad hip. "You do realize we're going to be hanging in this place together all the time for a _long_ while, right? Whatever's got you acting like this, you need to get your shit together. I'm not going to tolerate this kind of behavior."

"Don't ask me to be anything else but your subordinate and we'll be perfectly fine."

Annoyed, Leonida said: "You're really uptight, you know that?"

"I've been told that before, yeah," he challengingly replied. 

They glared at each other.

"Fine," moodily relented Leo. "We'll maintain a boring professional relationship and nothing more. I really thought you'd be more interesting than this, Arkady."

"I also have a rank and a surname, Captain Trust." Arkady pointed at his insignia. "Private Dragunin."

She snorted in disbelief. "Oh, come on. You can't be serious. Are you really _that_ stuck-up?"

"I'm completely serious," he gravely answered.

Leonida abruptly decided she'd had enough of this conversation. "You know what, I'm just going to let you cool down and work until you get over your stupid mood swing. I like to think I don't get pissed off easily but if you disrespect me like this again I'll have you doing pumps until you cough up blood, you hear me?"

Arkady's blue eyes were expressionless now. "Loud and clear, Captain Trust."

Leo sighed and let her hand drop from her hip as she turned away from him. She walked across the room and through the automatic doors, then suddenly spun around in the middle of the entrance to tell him: "Whatever your issue is with me, Dragunin, you better tell me what it is before this goes too far. And I'm not gonna be calling you Private when it's just the two of us, that's stupid."

Then she walked away and the doors slid shut behind her.


	4. Trekking down the Tunnels

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompts: Exhaustion, Collapse

Grenelant looked up from his papers and blinked muzzily, then realized he felt a bit dry. The opiel looked over to the side of his room and the clock- digital, they called it- showed him that it was already morning. Another fleeting night spent pouring over knowledge instead of resting without proper hydration... It was no wonder he felt so tired. The chair raked across the floor as he stood up, his webbed fingers a mere few inches away from touching the low ceiling when he stretched, and then he brushed down the many layers of fabric of his outfit to tidy his undesirably unruly appearance. He quickly and efficiently swept up the documents strewn about on the surface of his desk to form a neat pile on the side and left the room. 

The ship was quiet in these parts, as it often was when the two humans went about their respective business. Grenelant was grateful for it. The less he had to listen to them squabble during one day, the better. He headed down the hallway for the sanitaries and felt around for nearby humidity, once again unpleasantly reminded of how inorganic this place was. His membranous wings flickered in troubled annoyance at the thought of spending such a long time aboard, so far from the marshes and rivers of his home planet. Nostalgia, in turn, dawned in his heart when his thoughts brought him back to his home and family. Grenelant missed swimming in the underwater tunnels which seamlessly connected with those on the surface, missed the comforting thrum of water beneath his wings, missed the soft flutter of fish drifting close to his skin, missed the fresh humidity of algous upholstery that was so much more comfortable than the dry chairs on this ship. 

He promptly berated himself for allowing his mind to meander down such a wistful lane. Here in space, he was less of an opiel than he was Ophena's ambassador, and it really would not do for him to behave like a child. The Court had known this would be Grenelant's first interstellar mission yet they'd still trusted him to see it through, and so he would. He had to. He hadn't worked so hard all his life only to fail on his first real chance to prove his worth to the most powerful people on Ophena. Homesickness wouldn't get the best of him after a mere three weeks of travelling in a spaceship when they still had at least five months to go- and Grenelant tried not to grow to disheartened at the reminder that this was only in the best case scenario.

The opiel let out a discreet sigh as he checked on the water reserves again, a nervous habit he'd aquired five days after they'd lost the ship's external humidity collectors. Lack of sleep wasn't the only reason his skin was abnormally dry; he'd soon noticed the reserves and sanitaries hadn't been meant to take into account the needs of his species on their own, and so he'd had to make do with less frequent immersions, in more shallow depths than he would've liked. It had been enough, for a while, but now Grenelant was starting to feel the effects of neglecting an important part of his biology. He didn't want to give the earthlings reason to think he'd ever rely on them after the last fiasco he'd been forced to take part of, but he couldn't push it back any longer. Pride be damned. He needed their help.

* * *

"Captain Trust."

She spun around in her seat and her head tilted back to face him. " _Leonida_. We're just the three of us here! There's no need to remain so formal, Grenelant, I keep telling you."

Arkady was sitting in front of a panel on the far left of the control room, where he'd stopped rummaging for a few seconds to watch the tall amphibian step up to their captain. Now he was rolling his eyes as he checked the wires, and Grenelant heard him mutter to himself: "Here we go again."

Leonida shot him a look. "What?"

The man didn't look up from what he was doing and mumbled: "Nothing."

"Spit it out, Arkady."

He finally glanced at her. "Sir, no offense, but getting annoyed because Grenelant can't call you anything other than Captain yet won't change anything. It took me two weeks to stop calling you that and I still slip up."

"He's never called me Leonida and he's been here for _three!_ "

 _And I was injured on the second by your fault,_ wryly thought Grenelant, but he kept quiet. 

Arkady shrugged. "In my division our superior was on a total power trip, and we both know how the army goes in general. You can't expect me to drop the habit of calling superiors by their title. Not everyone's like you."

She crossed her arms. "You two are just the most stuck-up people in the universe."

Grenelant took advantage of the lull in their conversation to say: "You'll have to forgive me, Captain. Hierarchy is very deeply ingrained in the ways of my people."

"I think I'm beginning to get that," Leonida said with a little smile that was bordering on wry and teasing. "All right, Grenelant, what did you want with me?"

"There's an issue concerning our water backup supply."

"I don't know what you're going on about, I check the levels every day and there's enough for three weeks just like there's meant to be," said Arkady with a frown. "Why would _you_ even check those? That's my job."

The subtext was clear: why was Grenelant lowering himself to the menial task of checking parameters within the ship when he was the ambassador, only here to sit around and symbolize the cooperation between two planets? Not to mention that this was an insult to Arkady's abilities as the ship's technician.

Grenelant faced him. "You've had enough water for your consumption, but not for mine."

"What do you mean?" asked Leonida. Her tone of voice was concerned.

"We lost the water processors on the outside of the ship and the regenerative system isn't nearly enough on its own to replace all our daily water consumption. My species requires frequent submersion in water and I can't reasonably deplete the reserves without putting us all in potential danger, which means I've had to restrain myself from following through with that habit. Unfortunately, I don't think I can hold this less than ideal rythm for much longer."

"Grenelant, why didn't you say anything before?" exclaimed Leonida, suddenly straightening in her seat. "How often do you usually need to do that?"

"Two times per day."

"And how many times have you been doing it?"

"Once every two days, and even then, it seems to be quite unreasonable of me to use so much water. I've been keeping the levels relatively steady but this won't do in the long run. I'm aware they aren't supposed to dip beneath 90% outside of an emergency situation and continuing like this will lead to violation of protocol if we don't find a solution to my problem."

"Are you all right?" Leonida was frowning now, her gaze calculating as it looked him over. "I thought your hair looked a little dry. Is it dehydration?"

She didn't sound worried, but rather like she was watching out for a flaw she'd need to fix. Grenelant preferred the captain's analytical concern over useless fretting, it made him feel less like he was doomed to be in their debt once they'd figure out a way to provide him with the water he needed.

"I'll be fine as long as this doesn't last. What do you suggest?"

Leonida glanced over at her second. "Arkady? Any ideas?"

Arkady had disappeared behind the panel again and he grumbled: "I'm not the smart one here."

"Well," she said thoughtfully, like she hadn't actually expected him to say anything worthwhile, "I guess we'll have to see if there's another planet we could land on to get water earlier. I would've made sure the reserves were bigger if I'd known." She turned around to step up to one of the screens and asked: "Why'd you keep quiet about this?"

"I didn't realize it could get this dire. Obviously your people didn't take into account what would happen if the collectors stopped working."

"Probably not," bluntly agreed Leonida as her finger swiped across the luminescent surface. It figured. Grenelant didn't know why he was still surprised by her brutal honesty. "Okay, let me just reprogram our route and we'll be on our way to get more water."

* * *

They eventually docked on a small deserted dwarf planet amidst the nearest icy belt they could deviate towards and disembarked in heated suits, except for Leonida. Her standard outfit seemed to serve many, many purposes and Grenelant was quietly admirative of its versatility, watching in fascination as the brightly colored plates of Leonida's body shifted from red to a reflection of her surroundings. The air wasn't toxic, which he was grateful for as it didn't warrant wearing a suffocating helmet. 

The pure water was concentrated deep below the first outer layer of the planet which meant they couldn't just land and take it; they'd need to get close to it and bring back full containers. Leonida showed Grenelant how to use the crafts meant for exploration and collection in a hostile environment: flying vehicles that glided close to the ground, small enough to fit through natural tunnels and big enough to bring back consequent amounts of food or water or whatever samples they'd see fit to pick up. Grenelant trailed at the back on the first half of the first day of their descent because it took him some time to get the hang of the commands that weren't made for his long, webbed hands, but eventually he managed to catch up with them and remained at their level. Their progress was stopped very soon when it became clear that even the considerably downsized vehicles wouldn't allow them to go very far; the tunnels hadn't remained wide enough. There was a short moment of deliberation and eventually Leonida told them they'd go on foot.

"What?" Arkady's exclamation crackled through the radio. "How're we supposed to bring back the water _on foot?_ "

"The containers have wheels, we'll drag them along."

"Cap- Leonida, sir, they'll be way too heavy once we fill them!"

"Right." There was hesitation on Leonida's end. "Sorry, Arkady. I forgot you don't have our strength."

"Wow, thanks," quietly mumbled the man. He probably hadn't intended to be audible but Grenelant heard it well enough, and he had no doubt it was the same for Leonida. She didn't react.

"Grenelant, just to be sure, I assume you're strong enough to carry yours alone. Right?"

"Yes."

"Would two containers be enough water for you until we reach the next checkpoint on our trajectory?

"Yes, but I have another proposition since we're going on foot."

"Shoot," said Leonida.

Grenelant addressed their technician. "Dragunin, would you be able to modify the water purification machine so it could recycle greater volumes of water in the same time as it currently is?"

"I'm pretty sure I can pull that off, yeah," answered the man.

"Then I'd advise you to only take one tank, Captain Trust. The water purification machine should be able to recycle enough water for me to use it once a day and I'll get by like this until we get more water through safer means. There's no need to burden ourselves with superfluous weight if we can do this the easy way."

"Oh, good!" enthusiastically said Leonida. "Should be a breeze then! It'll go fast if we're three to carry a single container. Happy, Arkady?"

"Never been happier," grumbled Arkady.

"It's settled then! All right, everyone, let's go."

Leonida moved fast. Grenelant had already noticed when they'd been walking through crowds that her strides were always long and quick and determined; however, he'd yet to see her moving on this kind of bumpy, treacherous terrain, and he was reluctantly admirative of how easy she made it seem. Where Arkady kept slipping and stumbling, where Grenelant's webbed feet had to be carefully positioned, Leonida never once hesitated. She was the one doing most of the pulling for the container. It was like she could see the path laid out before her while both Grenelant and Arkady were left to struggle in her wake, rocks crumbling beneath their steps. The opiel kept one hand warily pressed up against the wall in case he lost his footing, and the human seemed to want to prove he didn't need such support by keeping his own in his pockets. His arms ended up shooting more often than not to catch himself and in the end Arkady kept his hands out as well. 

They made good progress on the first day. They rarely paused because Leonida was so intent on getting the water as soon as possible so they could get back on their regularly scheduled route. Grenelant appreciated that this woman who was to guide them to Ophena's lost colony was someone who knew exactly what she wanted and would follow through with it no matter what unexpected events occurred; determination was a primordial quality in a leader. She was overly confident and got them in more trouble than Grenelant would've desired, but one thing was for certain, and it was that Leonida Trust knew very well how to lead. He wondered if she guided large troups with that same efficient will and certainty. It was likely. Captain wasn't just a title for her, she had the aura of a commander.

As for Arkady... Grenelant glanced over at the human. He may have been from the same planet as the captain, but he had neither the stamina nor the steady demeanor of his superior. Grenelant knew Arkady was more of a human than Leonida, he'd studied them for some time after all; the records did say that humans were more fragile and less resiliant than opiels but Grenelant hadn't thought it meant they tired out so fast. Arkady was slower now. They hadn't had much opportunity to sleep the night before, as this planet was unknown territory and Leonida didn't want them to linger too long in the same spot in case there was a danger roaming around that they weren't yet aware of. These tunnels didn't seem to be an entirely natural geological structure. Leonida had listened when Grenelant had pointed this out, and so they'd kept moving. 

So far there had been few pauses to eat and sleep during which Leonida had always been the one to keep watch. The night had lasted two hours at best. Grenelant didn't require any longer time asleep but he could tell that Arkady did. This was the second day they were trekking through the dark tunnels- the third since they'd left the ship- and in the harsh light of their suits which made their surroundings pale and nearly blinding, Grenelant saw the dark bags that had appeared under the man's eyes. Another thing he'd noticed was the way Arkady didn't ask for pauses. The human was obviously relieved when Leonida told them they could stop, but he never asked. Grenelant himself wasn't feeling well. The tunnels humidity, while cold, did help a bit; however he'd gone too long without taking a dip in a body of water while already dehydrated from the start. His wings were clumped together in a very uncomfortable way and his skin felt clammy. He hadn't yet reached the point of dizziness but he knew it wouldn't be far now.

Arkady tripped. The human had been tripping more often, and he hastily caught himself on the tank. "Fuck!"

"Watch your step, Arkady," rang out Leonida's tranquil voice the way it had every time.

"I know!" annoyedly spat the man, and he ragingly pushed himself up to straighten but tripped again immediately after. Grenelant was fast enough to catch him before he hit the ground.

"Are you alright?" he inquired.

Arkady pulled his arm away with a snarl. "Let go!"

The opiel let go and Arkady scrambled back to his feet with a powerful glare. Puzzled by this display of hostility, Grenelant steadily said: "I was just trying to help."

"I don't _need_ your help," seethed the human.

Leonida had turned around to see what the fuss was about and she said: "No need to be so grumpy, Arkady, we're almost there."

"I'm grumpy because I'm goddamn tired. Fuck, aren't you?"

She shrugged and turned around. "Nope. Battery's still good."

"And I bet frogman's just fine, too," resentfully muttered Arkady.

Grenelant immediately took offense to the term. He'd seen what frogs looked like and although he couldn't deny there was a resemblance, he really didn't like being compared to those little heaps of slimy skin and protruding eyes. He coldly retorted: "Yes, and I'd certainly feel even better if you stopped your ceaseless whining." 

Leonida muffled her laugh behind her hand and Arkady shot the opiel a murderous look.

"I'm _not_ whining, I'm tired! What, I can't even say that without getting judged?"

Grenelant ignored him. Arkady opened his mouth to keep complaining but then seemed to think better of it. His shoulders slumped, he shook his head, and he resumed pushing the container.

Arkady's stumbles increased in frequency over the next hours and when he outright tripped over and fell on his rear, Grenelant decided to speak up. "Captain Trust, I think we should take a break."

She turned around, watching Arkady awkwardly pick himself up, and said: "Do you need one? We're almost there. Half a day at most."

That glare again. Grenelant didn't like how resentful Arkady's blue eyes were and he especially didn't like the disdainful way the human turned his head away from him, as if Grenelant had done him a personal offense by asking for a short rest.

"I'm good to go, sir," Arkady answered.

"Okay," she answered with a nod. "Grenelant?"

"We should stop."

"I don't need a pause," growled Arkady.

Grenelant looked down at the human and steadily said: "I do."

Arkady's features slackened a little when he realized he'd been acting quite like everything revolved around him, and then he frowned and looked away. It looked like embarrassment. Grenelant supposed it was some sort of consolation that while egocentric and prone to complaints, the human wasn't completely devoid of a sense of self-awareness.

Leonida let go of the tank. "Then you two sit down for a bit, I'll go check the perimeter. Don't fight again, your arguing gets loud and that's really the last thing we need here."

"Understood," said Grenelant, and he bent his knees to sit. Arkady waited for Leonida to disappear before going to lean against the wall and sliding down to the ground. There was a short while of silence, then Arkady let out a weary sigh and let his head tip back against the wall.

Grenelant looked around the place and he noticed something dark sticking against the wall a few feet away from the human, so he slowly pushed himself back to his feet and came closer. He was tired, but that wouldn't stop him from investigating this place. He felt Arkady's gaze on him but didn't pay attention to the human, instead kneeling down in front of the dark spot which turned out to be long strands of black hair. Curious. Grenelant reached for his bag and took out a vial, always eager to take samples back to the ship to study, and Arkady shifted to take a closer look at what he was doing.

"What's that?"

"Fur," said Grenelant. He wasn't one to hold a grudge against another person, even if said person was incredibly rude at best. "Either from the creature that made these tunnels, either from one that took residency in this place."

Arkady didn't say anything. Grenelant glanced at him and saw that he really didn't seem reassured by the news. 

Grenelant put away the vial in his pack and added: "I did tell you both that these tunnels weren't the result of natural causes."

"Yeah, I heard you the first time," tensely said Arkady.

He looked wary as he crossed his arms on his knees and hunched over. Grenelant didn't exactly blame the human for being scared, he wasn't confident himself either. It had been jarring enough to meet other civilizations than those of Ophena; now they were stuck on a planet they'd thought deserted until Grenelant had observed it likely wasn't, and they had no clue what the life forms inhabiting it looked like. It could be dangerous if the creature living here turned out to be a predator. Grenelant stood up, and that was when the first wave of dizziness washed over him. He wavered and steadied himself against the wall.

"Woah," came Arkady's voice from a distance. "What's with you?"

"I'm just- Lack of water. I've told you about this too."

"You did, yeah... You should probably sit down."

"Yes." Grenelant didn't even step away from the wall, just let himself drop to the ground right there. He couldn't tell if he'd voluntarily sat down or if his legs had given up on him. The latter option was unlikely, he was an opiel after all. Legs were the strongest part of them.

"Do you not have any water left?" ventured Arkady after a beat.

"I do, but it's drinking water, and not nearly enough for what I need at the moment."

Arkady fell silent again and laid his head back against the wall. There wasn't much else to say. Grenelant closed his eyes and waited for the spell to pass, and when he opened them again he saw that Arkady had done the same. Grenelant took advantage of the fact that Arkady wasn't looking to gauge the state the human was in. Grenelant was no expert on these creatures in particular but he knew enough to observe that the fact that Arkady had paled, coupled with the fine tremors in his hands as they rested against his knees, meant that he was just as exhausted as Grenelant felt. Arkady may have denied needing this halt but it was obvious this was beneficial for the both of them. Grenelant wondered if a human different from Arkady and Leonida would have been able to keep up in the same conditions. After all, Arkady was the unique soldier who'd been chosen to accompany an army captain on a mission through space; that had to mean his abilities were above average and that he was far from weak in human standards.

Leonida returned a few seconds later and the sound of her voice pulled him out of his thoughts. "All right, guys, I didn't see or hear anything weird. How are you holding up, Grenelant?"

He looked up at her and admitted: "This isn't the best I've ever felt in my life. I may be reaching a limit soon."

Leonida stopped in front of him. "And what does that entail?"

"It starts with dizziness. That phase lasts a while, and eventually issues with thermoregulation come into play, as well as loss of strength."

"Life-threatening?"

"It can be, yes. But it takes time to reach that point and I've only just started getting dizzy. There's no need to worry. At worst, I'll survive until the next stop the way I have up until now."

Leonida stared at him, her lips pressed together in a thin line. "Your health wouldn't be good."

"No," acknowledged Grenelant. "It would be much better if we could bring water back to the ship."

"Have you had this happen to you before?"

"Once or twice, yes. But never beyond the dizzy phase."

"So then we'd better hurry before you get worse."

Grenelant glanced in Arkady's direction. His head was now fully resting against his arms and his breathing had a calmer rythm. Leonida turned to follow his gaze and they both stared at the human.

"We might want to give him a chance to sleep," said Grenelant. "Doesn't your species require at least seven per day to function optimally? He hasn't even had half of that in two."

Leonida nodded with a musing air. "I tend to forget what it's like to be human. He complains a lot so I thought as long as he was vocal, he was probably fine, but I might've been pushing him a little too hard."

Grenelant looked up at her. "I've been meaning to ask, if it's not indelicate..."

"Shoot," she cordially said as she sat down next to him. 

"You come from Earth and you look similar to Dragunin, but what are you exactly?"

"I was human once, if that's what you were wondering, just like this guy. Now I'm more of a machine than what I used to be." She flashed him a smile. "It comes in handy."

Grenelant nodded. Though he was tired and rest was preferable, fascination pushed him to continue the conversation. "Is this common where you come from?"

"No." Her smile turned pensive. "Definitely not. A lot of people told me I was crazy for wanting this."

"Why?"

"Modifying the body you've had for all your life is kind of... an extreme decision. And my transformation was a first. They hadn't had successful attempts before me so people thought it would fail and that I'd die or become irreversibly crippled, stuff like that."

"...I can't imagine what it must have felt like to go through such a thing."

Grenelant's species had a single morphological change during their lifetime and it was in their early stages of life, just like babies and adults in humans. Once the second form was aquired, it was for a lifetime, and to change one's own appearance was practically unheard of on Ophena. Grenelant had in fact been very surprised to learn that humans often chose to change their sex, and in doing so, shift the nature of the secondary sexual characteristics aquired during their puberty. Nothing so extreme had ever been done on his home planet.

"I chose this. I don't regret it," stated Leonida. Then she smiled at him again. "You might want to take this time to rest too, Grenelant. You do look pretty pooped."

"Pooped?" Grenelant echoed, hoping this wasn't an insult the captain had come up with out of the blue. No matter the planet, insults often came down to talk about excrements.

She laughed. "It means tired, don't get your panties in a twist." A second to realize, and she added: "That one means 'don't get worked up over it'."

"I see, thank you for explaining. I think I'll do as you said."

"Good." She got back up in one fluid motion, and as usual said: "I'll keep watch."

Vibrations were what startled Grenelant back to consciousness : vibrations travelling from the packed earth at his back to the core of his body, his lung and his eardrums. He saw movement on his right. It was Leonida rushing up to them, her features pulled tight, and when she saw that he was already awake she ran to Arkady to shake her second-in-command awake.

"Get up! Get up, we have to go!"

Arkady blinked awake with a groan and he squinted at her in confusion. "Wha-?"

She grabbed him by the collar and hefted him up as if he weighed nothing at all. "No time to explain, gotta run!"

He was about to answer when a horrid screech suddenly echoed through the tunnels. Arkady's eyes widened with fear and Grenelant picked himself off the ground as hastily as the human stumbled after their leader. A rumbling sound travelled through the air around them and dirt started pattering to the ground. They stilled when the earth over their heads started cracking and crumbling. 

"Get back!" yelled Leonida. 

She pulled Arkady back in the direction they'd just come from so brutally that the human was thrown to the ground in an undignified pile of limbs, and Grenelant reflexively leapt back just as part of the tunnel collapsed in the spot they'd occupied just a second ago. 

"Shit!" swore Leonida as she picked her second off the floor. "Run!"

"What about that thing we heard-" started Arkady, but she cut him off with a roar.

" _Run!_ "

They ran. They ran back towards the spot they'd been resting in but didn't have the time to reach it before the screech resounded again, this time unmistakably close.

"It's above us!" yelled Grenelant.

Leonida looked up sharply and then grabbed the both of them to shove them up against the wall.

Arkady yelled, "What-"

Thunder exploded when the ceiling caved in, silt and rubble tumbling everywhere around them, and horror truly dawned on Grenelant when he saw the shadow of something huge slithering down from the dark network of tunnels showing in the split layers of earth. Grenelant didn't see it for long because then Leonida was grabbing him by the collar and forcing him to duck down with Arkady. There were several impacts above him and it took Grenelant a moment to realize that it was the sound of rock hitting metal- of rock hitting _Leonida_. Just as he understood that she was shielding them with her body, a final slab toppled down on the group of three and their captain took the brunt of it. He had the time to see the tight expression on her face before her light shorted out. Then there was silence, save for the light sounds of dirt sifting and pebbles bouncing on the ground. Arkady and Grenelant were unharmed, still caught in the protective brace of Leonida's arms.

"Oh, fuck," Arkady was the first to say. "Shit, what _was_ that?"

"Captain, are you all right?" Grenelant quickly asked when Leonida didn't move.

"Just- Give me a moment. Give me a minute." She sounded fine, but the fact that she was staying so still was worrying.

"What's wrong?"

"Just recalibrating some stuff, routine, don't worry about it. Took a nasty blow."

"You took a few of them," Grenelant said. He couldn't believe she was still standing, much less that she was able to talk, yet there she was. Just what kind of human was she?

Arkady shifted next to him and his light moved with him, brushing over Leonida's front, and then he asked: "Are you hurt or are you just stuck?"

She let out a little laugh. "I might be just stuck. I'd advise you two not to move until I can."

"How long will that be?"

"About ten minutes, I think."

Arkady audibly swallowed. "Can't we try to dig out?"

"And that, Arkady, would be the best way to get all the dirt to collapse on you," teasingly answered their captain.

Gren could make out the change in pace of the man's breathing and he carefully turned to look at him. "Are you all right, Dragunin?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm uh, I'm fine," hastily said Arkady. He swallowed again and ran a hand through his short hair. "Just not a fan of small spaces, you know."

Grenelant didn't know, but he chose not to say that. Arkady seemed to be very uneasy and the opiel didn't want to risk saying anything upsetting in this situation. 

"Just a few minutes," said Leonida. "Keep it together."

Arkady clenched his fist and lowered his arm back in his lap, nodding. "Yessir."

"How are you both doing after all that running around?"

"The adrenaline sure woke me up," said Arkady.

"I hope we find the water soon," answered Grenelant. "It'll be safer for us once I've recovered."

"Do you have to stay in there for an hour or something for it to work?" inquired Leonida.

"I see you've taken great pains to learn about my species," annoyedly said Grenelant.

She smiled, embarrassed, and admitted: "I'm not really the studious kind."

"Between thirty minutes and forty-five," said Arkady. The other two looked at him in surprise and he defensively said: "What? I got briefed on this operation too. I have good memory."

"That's correct," said Grenelant, and he looked up the Leonida. "Will you be able to remember that, Captain?"

"My, my, are you giving me sass, Grenelant?" she said with a wide grin. "Here I thought you were doomed to eternal formality. Oh, and sass means you're being mouthy."

"I would never," gravely said Grenelant.

Next to him, Arkady shifted and grumbled: "Shit, that was one nasty earthquake."

"I'm almost done recalibrating, we should be able to check out the aftermath soon."

"I think I saw what caused it," quietly said Grenelant. Leonida's brown gaze grew sharper and Arkady's head snapped in his direction.

"You saw something?!"

"Just a shadow. There's definitely something living down here."

"Great," muttered Arkady.

"We'll have to be careful," said Leonida. Something clicked, and then she let out a sigh. "All right, finally."

Her arms slowly moved and she pushed herself away from the wall a small fraction, and dirt fell on Grenelant's face. He wiped it away from his eyes and mouth and watched as she flexed her fingers, then shifted her left arm to hold it over their heads so that it would still hold up most of the packed dirt above them while her right arm reached behind her. She felt around each side of her shoulders and then said: "Okay."

The frame of her body tensed and she started pushing outwards. It took Grenelant a moment to realize that she was moving the huge slab of rock out of the way even thought it was easily twice her size and likely incredibly heavy. He didn't think he'd ever cease being surprised by her strength. More dirt sifted through and pattered on the ground beneath Arkady and Grenelant.

"What do we do?" asked Arkady.

"Don't move yet." Her voice didn't even sound that strained. "Actually, Arkady, I want you to take position beneath me, don't want you getting squashed if there's another rock behind it. Grenelant, get ready to help me if we have to catch something heavy."

"Yes, Captain." He straightened a bit and yet another clump of dirt hit the middle of his face, which he annoyedly brushed away.

"Okay," she grunted again, and she braced against the slab until it finally started sliding a bit faster. Soil was sloughing off and Leonida warned them both: "Hold your breath, just in case."

Once she was sure they'd complied, Leonida gave the slab a final shove to the side, burying it in one of the walls of dirt that encased them. Fortunately, the slab had been the last big thing to fall so nothing came tumbling down on top of their heads but the brittle dirt and pebbles that poured in their space. Leonida reacted fast and grabbed Arkady by the collar.

"Sorry about this, try not to bump your head or anything."

"What, wh-"

Leonida was already throwing Arkady outside like a sack of supplies. Grenelant felt the hefty thump of the man's body hitting the surface and a loud: "Ow, what the fuck Leonida?!"

"Quit whining!" she yelled back, and before Grenelant had the time to react she was hefting him up as well.

"Wait, I can jump!" he hastily told her before she could eject him like she had the human.

She opened her mouth to answer but Grenelant decided to show her before they lost more time in this space that was quickly filling up, and he wrapped his long arm around her waist before bunching up his muscles and jumping in one powerful thrust. The soil that had reached up to his knees grabbed at his legs, but the opiel had anticipated it and jumped with enough force that getting out of the hole was no problem at all. He landed smoothly on the surface and let go of the captain, who looked positively elated.

"That was awesome!" she exclaimed excitedly.

"You couldn't have told us you could do that before she threw my ass outside?" bitterly asked Arkady, who seemed to be nursing a sore butt.

"Maybe he couldn't carry two people at once, Arkady, have you though of that?"

"Actually, I can," Grenelant corrected Leonida. "You didn't leave me time to tell you. If I'd known your plan was to throw Dragunin out than I would've suggested carrying you both out of here from the start."

"Whatever, the important thing is that we're all out of that death trap safe and sound," stated Leonida with sparkling brown eyes. "You think you could do that again, but like, for fun?"

"For fun?" echoed Grenelant.

"Right, you probably don't know what that means," she mischieviously answered. "That's fine, we'll talk about this again when we get out of here. Hey, Arkady, you figure you could check the damage on my back? I'm pretty sturdy but I want to make sure it's nothing too bad."

"Yessir." Leonida turned around to show him her back and Arkady quickly scrambled to his feet so he could come closer to examine her. After a few seconds of smoothing his hand over the plates of her suit and checking her neck and shoulders, he declared: "Looks like you're pretty okay, Captain. I mean Leonida. I don't know what the hell it takes to get through your exoskeleton but it's definitely not a whole goddamn tunnel collapsing on top of you."

Grenelant went to lean against the wall of the tunnel, feeling dizzy again.

"My head?" inquired Leonida.

Arkady moved up and eventually said: "Yeah, you definitely took a nasty blow there. Not too bad, though. It cracked but I can repair that no problem, I can do that right now if you want."

Leonida spun around on herself. "No, let's get the tank and find that water for Grenelant first. I want him to get back in good health ASAP."

"Cap- Leonida, it'll only take a few minutes," insisted Arkady.

"And whatever that thing was can find us in less. Look at him," said Leonida, gesturing to Grenelant who was trying his best to stay standing upright. "I'm pretty sure we'd be better off not going a round two while he's like that.You'll repair me while Grenelant takes a break, and after that we'll book it."

Arkady turned to Grenelant. "Can you even walk?"

"Just give me a moment, please. It'll pass."

Leonida didn't give him a moment, promptly grabbing him as she walked by and tugging on his arm so that she was supporting him despite her shorter stature. "Let's move, Arkady."

"Yessir," he answered, and they headed back towards the rest area from earlier to fetch the abandoned tank.


	5. In the Creepy Forest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompts: Delayed Realization, Hidden Wound

They shouldn't have been so far from the ship and Arkady should've seen it coming. It was really stupid, in retrospect; he's noticed the shifty eyes and the twitches. He'd seen that behaviour plenty of times before and just because it wasn't in a dark alley didn't mean it couldn't happen elsewhere. It was Grenelant who'd wanted to fuck off in the goddamn forest to get some supplies he said they wouldn't find on the market and Leo had decided he'd teach both humans what he knew about local wildlife in case they needed it in the future and he wasn't there to help. This planet was going to be a pretty long stop so Arkady understood her reasoning; what he didn't understand was why they needed to go so goddamn far into the forest. Grenelant had to be able to find his stuff closer to their ship. Arkady was pretty sure he was only forcing them to go deeper to fuck with them, and he was ready to admit it was fucking with him. This place was super creepy. 

Apparently Arkady was the only one to notice that. Neither of the two others were ones to be unsettled by creepy forests and he figured it made sense that they didn't care. They weren't regular old humans like him, they didn't need to care because they didn't die as easily. It was bullshit and Arkady hated it.

Grenelant found his shit in one of the darker places, a few feet deep inside a cave. Arkady only half-listened to the boring stuff he was spouting about the number of petals the plant he was holding had, what kind of soil it needed to grow and its addictive properties. Leonida listened intently. Arkady kept twitching at every abnormal sound he heard. He felt like there were shadows within the darkness that surrounded them but he couldn't see them, and he could just feel that this place was bad news. He didn't even know why Leonida thought it was a good idea for him to be here, he didn't care about any of this and he still had the ship to fix after their encounter with a meteor shower during their latest trip. He needed to get out of here, out of this black, stinky cave and into a somewhat sunnier exterior.

"Fuck this," he suddenly said out loud and started leaving.

"Where do you think you're going?" Leonida asked him sternly. She wasn't often stern. Obviously she found this plant stuff super important to know.

"Going some place where I won't feel like I'm going vampire," he retorted as he continued walking.

"You're staying right here."

The order wasn't said in a loud voice but its finality rang like a bell and Arkady had no choice but to stop in his tracks. He sighed and turned around to face the two others. "Well can I at least stand next to the entrance? I swear, I feel like I'm going to choke in here."

Leo shrugged. "I don't care what you do, just listen."

"Okay, okay, I will," grumbled Arkady as he shuffled off. They were out of his view moments later but he could still hear their voices, and he leaned up against the wall, staring out at the greenery. It wasn't much brighter there but at least the surroundings looked alive. Grenelant continued droning on in the background and Arkady did try his hardest to concentrate on what he was saying, but it was really fucking boring. He ended up gazing up at the branches and searching for hidden birds, absent-mindedly wondering if they were anything like those on his and Leonida's home planet. 

A long, weaselly dirty face suddenly appeared in front of him and he stumbled back in surprise, barely stifling a scream. The thing let out a series of clicks and hisses, its frame tensed in menace and agitated by weird tics. It was wearing a loincloth as dirty as its face and Arkady noticed its eyes were sunken and red-rimmed, constantly shifting around like it was watching out for anything that would jump it.

Arkady didn't want to alert it to the others' presence by calling for help so he decided to try and appease it, hoping his two teamates had heard the commotion. "Look man, I have no idea-"

The beast jolted like Arkady had assaulted it by simply speaking and it suddenly pushed him against the wall of what he instantly realized was probably a burrow rather than a cave. The hissing became louder and Arkady was assaulted by the disgusting odour of its mouth which he could now see was covered in sores and blisters, and then he felt a horrible stinging sensation in his chest and thigh. He opened his mouth to shout but the beast landed a heavy blow to his head and he hit the ground hard, stunned.

"Arkady!"

He blinked, head ringing, and saw Leonida tackle the beast to the ground. Grenelant crouched next to him to help him up and Arkady snarled through his confusion as soon as he felt hands on him. "Get off me!"

Grenelant retrieved his hands looking genuinely confused, and Arkady resisted the urge to yell at him. What was so difficult to understand about not needing help? It wasn't the first time Arkady refused to be held up and he thought he'd made it pretty obvious that he hated when people thought he needed their pity. Leonida grunted on the side and Arkady looked over there as sharp, needling pain suffused the spots on his body where he'd been stung. 

"Shit," he said, and he jumped back to his feet to help her. His fingers quickly found his gun and he drew it out, aiming it steadily at the beast's head. "Stop moving or I'll shoot!"

"Just shoot it!" yelled Leonida as she narrowly avoided wickedly sharp claws. They hadn't looked like that when the beast had first approached Arkady. He didn't need to be told twice and his bullet instantly found its mark. The beast slumped, blood splattering beneath its skull. Arkady lowered his gun.

"Darn," muttered Grenelant. He didn't sound happy that they'd killed the stupid thing.

Leonida was standing up in an instant and she marched up to Arkady. "Where did it get you?"

"What?" said Arkady in confusion as he put away his gun.

"Where did it get you? Did it sting you?"

Arkady nodded and started gesturing to his thigh as he let go of his holster. "Yeah, it got me-"

Leonida moved in a blur and Arkady found himself pantsless in a second. He felt his face heat up and yelled: "What the f-"

"Shut up," ordered Leonida as her fingers pressed into red divots where the beast's claws had stung him. "Did it get you elsewhere?"

"What, are you gonna strip me naked if I say yes?"

She narrowed her eyes at him as she kept that same pressure into the sting wounds. "Arkady."

"No, okay!" lied Arkady. Had he been stung anywhere other than the chest, maybe he wouldn't have minded. It wasn't the case. "What's gonna happen anyway? I don't feel weird, it just hurts."

Leonida pressed her lips together and nodded, then pulled his pants back up and took a step back. "We'll probably be fine if we start going back to the ship right now, that way we'll have the pod at our disposal if something goes wrong."

Grenelant had moved towards the beast and was kneeling next to it, pressing precise spots on its paws. He shook his head and muttered: "Shame."

"It was going to kill us," Leo stated. "You can't guilt-trip me. Now get up and let's go."

"Fine," grumbled the opiel, but he didn't follow them immediately. Arkady didn't care what he was up to, he was kind of spooked that Leo had been so quick to check the sting wounds and that she thought there was a possibility for something to go wrong. Even if his thigh already hurt less, he wanted to get back to the ship like she'd said they should. Just to be safe.

"What was up with that thing, anyway?" asked Arkady as he made his way across the forest with her.

"It was under the influence of that plant Gren picked up. We were probably in its home and I wouldn't be surprised if it got aggressive over defending its stash. He said that stuff's very addictive."

"Well shit. I thought its behavior was kinda familiar."

Leo smiled at him. "Bad experiences?"

"Yeah," answered Arkady. He didn't say anything else. The pain was fading completely now, both in his thigh and his chest.

Grenelant joined up with them soon after and Arkady distractedly listened as he struck up the conversation with Leonida once more. His skin felt kind of numb where he'd been stung but he didn't feel weird otherwise. Hopefully the beast hadn't stung him deep enough for his venom... or poison... or whatever it was to have an effect, however it worked. Arkady was a soldier and a technician, not a biologist. He knew how to fight and defend, he knew how to fix delicate technology, but he didn't have much knowledge that wouldn't serve him in either of those ways.

It was several minutes later that he started feeling hot. Everything was louder, he felt jumpy, his heart was beating in his ears. He was all sweaty. Arkady blinked the salt out of his eyes and looked up at the sky, but there was no sky, only high branches arching over his head. He felt closed in. He didn't like it.

"Arkady?"

He looked back down and saw Leo staring at him. Grenelant too, shortly after. 

Arkady said: "I hate this place."

Leonida looked half-amused, half-impatient. "I can tell. If you walk faster we'll be out sooner."

Arkady nodded and they all resumed their progress.

Grenelant and Leonida started talking about plants again. 

Arkady stopped feeling hot and started feeling cold instead, but only for a short moment. The heat returned full force seconds later in a scorching wave that burned his heart and he felt it skip a beat, and the world spun around him, and he had to catch himself against a nearby tree. The bark hurt his fingers. He blinked wildly and looked up at the sky again, but it was still obscured by the dark canopy of leaves. He couldn't see the sky and the forest was going to crush him. Arkady looked back ahead and noticed the others were going out of focus.

"Uh, Leo... I think something's..."

His voice wasn't as loud as it normally was. He thought he saw them turn around but he wasn't sure. Arkady's stomach hurt, his chest was caught in a vice, his heart skipped another beat and then sped up to compensate. The shapes hadn't turned around. Maybe they hadn't noticed he'd stopped, maybe he'd been too quiet to get their attention.

"Something's..."

One of them looked over their shoulder. He knew it was Leo because of the blonde hair, but the rest of her features were completely blurry now. He felt out of breath, his heart was going too fast and it hurt.

"Leo," he said.

The wild thing in his chest tripped and Arkady felt his legs give out beneath him. He heard a shout ahead of him. His hand felt like it was ripping up where it dragged across the bark in his fall and his body hit the ground with a dull thud that resounded through his head in a disorienting echo. The twigs were spikes against his skin, even the cool dirt pressed up against his face felt like gravel.

"Arkady!" Hands gripped his clothes and rolled him over, and as he laid with his back against the ground he realized he really couldn't breathe very well. Leonida was above him, her brown eyes the only feature he could focus on. They looked worried but mostly determined, and she turned away from him to talk to the tall shape by her side. "You said the poison wouldn't act this fast!"

"He might've gotten stung elsewhere."

Leonida's gaze returned to his face. "Arkady, you moron, where else did you get stung?"

Arkady realized what she was asking of him and shook his head. He felt faint, he couldn't stop gasping. His heart was giving up on him. For some reason he was more scared of what she was going to do than of dying- and he knew he was dying. He could feel it.

"Fine, be that way," she sharply said.

Arkady's eyes widened when he felt his clothes be ripped apart and he desperately tried to stop her, choking out: "No!" His hand shot up to curl around her wrist, but his grip was weak and he couldn't hold his arm up longer than a few seconds before it ended up falling back to the ground. It was too late, anyway. He knew she'd seen it from the surprised look on her face when she lifted the flaps of his half-torn shirt.

She stopped pulling on his clothes. Her brown gaze flew up to his face and she studied him closely, calmly ordering: "Grenelant, turn around."

Out of the corner of his eye, Arkady saw the tall shape shift.

Leonida then offered Arkady an understanding smile as she lowered her hand to his chest, and he jerked beneath her touch. He hated this. He hated that touch, he hated the sympathy in her eyes, hated that she suddenly knew what was only supposed to be his.

"It's okay, Arkady. I'm the only one who saw."

"It's not... okay," he whispered through gritted teeth.

"It will be," she said with certainty. Her face was so honest that Arkady wanted to claw it off.

"Shut up, shut your damn mouth!"

Leonida pressed her lips together and Arkady saw her other hand appear above his head. It hovered over his face and came closer and closer until the cool fingers gently brushed against his forehead, softly enough that it didn't hurt.

"Then if you want it to be, it can all be a bad dream." 

Arkady wanted to answer, but his voice didn't come when he opened his mouth. His agitation had worked his throbbing heart into an uncontrollable rythm and it was tumbling in its erratic race against his ribcage. His throat was empty, and his chest was a frantic hollow, and his heart hiccuped again and again beneath Leonida's solid palm. Then all of a sudden, Arkady's eyes rolled to the back of his head and he didn't want anything anymore.

Something rested against his face, heavy and uncomfortable. Someone spoke next to him but Arkady was falling back into a black void.

A single thought drifted through his mind. He noticed that he was very tired. He didn't want to ever move again.

Arkady floated back to consciousness. There was beeping. It was loud in his ears. He floated away once more.

Someone was speaking again but Arkady couldn't understand any of it. He was annoyed. He wanted to sleep. The person shut up and so he fell asleep.

Arkady opened his eyes in his room. He was very confused when his brain told him this wasn't where he was supposed to be, and it took him a moment to remember why his brain was telling him that. Hadn't he been in the forest?

"Hey, sleepyhead."

Arkady looked over to the side in surprise and saw that Leonida was sitting next to his bed. He frowned and croaked: "... Leo?"

"That's me," she happily said.

Arkady pushed himself up. "What the fuck happened? Why are you here?"

Leonida's expression suddenly turned serious. "You got attacked in the forest where we accompanied Grenelant. Remember? You almost died."

Arkady's brow creased even deeper in concentration. He remembered killing the beast. Leonida checking on him. The forest tightening its hold around his chest, falling to the ground, being unable to move. Arkady slowly nodded. "It's a bit hazy after I fell."

"Do you often lie to your superiors, Arkady?"

Arkady sharply looked up to his captain. She'd said it calmly, she was almost always calm. In the months he'd spent together with her carefree personality and her informal ways, it had been easy to forget that she could pull rank on him. He quickly sat upright and straightened his spine.

"No, Captain."

"You lied to me."

"Yes, Captain. I'm sorry, it won't happen again."

"It's one thing to be dishonest with me. It's completely idiotic doing what you did when your life was in danger, and if we weren't so far from home you'd already be going back as we speak for not telling me you'd been stung in the chest too. I don't waste my time on soldiers with a death wish."

"Yes, Captain."

"Do you have a death wish?"

"No, Captain."

She continued staring at him and he kept the same rigid posture. Leonida then said: "You know what I am, Arkady. You know me inside out and you've never had a problem with that. What made you think I'd have a problem with you?"

Arkady felt a rush of dread when more of his memories returned to him and he was struck with the abrupt reminder that Leonida... had seen. He was rocked by a surge of anxious nausea but refused to look away from her intense brown eyes. "It wasn't you in particular. I didn't want anyone to know."

"Some people must have known."

A distant memory flashed in Arkady's mind but he distracted himself from it and asked: "Does Grenelant know?"

Leonida smiled brightly and petted Arkady's thigh. "Why would he know about a bad dream?" Then she reached out and pushed him back down, and he couldn't go against her strength. He was unable to resist the way his tired muscles relaxed against the mattress. "Now close your eyes and count to ten. You can only open them again once you've reached that number."

Arkady frowned at her. "Wh-"

"An order, Arkady," she chidingly said, all traces of her earlier stern demeanor entirely gone. "It's an order."

But as light-hearted as she suddenly sounded, Arkady had been reminded of his position beneath hers and he immediately complied. While he counted to ten he heard her stand up, walk up to the door, and leave. In the last seconds he spent counting up to the last number, all that surrounded him was darkness and silence. And then Arkady opened his eyes in an empty room. His gaze landed on the empty chair and then drifted up to the closed door, and it was like Leonida had never been here at all; like he'd just had one very long nightmare.


	6. Hostage Situation - Part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompts: Isolation, Hostage

There was a camera. There was always that damn camera following him around, surveying his every move, that single implacable dark eye he couldn't escape from. Arkady didn't know if anyone was even watching him through there. He'd given it the finger about every hour just in case. The room was dirty, the cracks in the walls packed with old mud and mold. The smell was terrible and he was fairly certain it came from the mangy cot that was pressed against one of the more decrepit walls. There was a hole in the ground in the corner where he assumed he was supposed to relieve himself. Upon understanding that he wouldn't have a modicum of privacy for this, he'd whirled around to yell at the camera: "You're sick freaks!"

Of course, there had been no answer.

Arkady paced around the dingy room, fuming and grumbling under his breath, cursing himself and the others for not having seen this coming. They'd been hanging around in the same spot for too long, their ship must have been spotted and reported. Arkady remembered he'd seen a blurry reflection of a gray outfit behind him while he'd been outside polishing the last metal panels of the stock Leo had bought for the ship, and he hadn't turned around fast enough. Next thing he knew he was waking up on the floor as a long, skittering bug slithered over the back of his hand. He'd thrown it away with a shout of surprise and scrambled to his hands and knees, and only then had he noticed the situation he was in. Arkady hadn't been the only one at the ship at that time and chances were Leonida had been taken too. He wasn't sure about Grenelant.

Arkady didn't know what he was supposed to expect; interrogation could vary from a simple interview to torture, or maybe he was just being held in a cell until whoever had taken him decided what it was they wanted to do with him. This didn't seem like it would be a place linked with this planet's authorities, but maybe it was; they were a primitive population. No one came and Arkady spent the afternoon trying to kick at the cracks in the wall and the narrow metal door to no avail. There was no window to try and break through, either. They hadn't left him any weapons but at least he still had his watch. How long was he going to be kept here?

He looked up at the camera. "What do you want?"

No answer. Arkady cursed again, this time in the rough and blocky sounds of his native tongue, and he resumed pacing. He hoped Leonida would be okay. She was tough, tougher than him and Grenelant, so he knew he didn't need to worry too much. Arkady looked around and went over the room's faults again to try and discern a weakness to his cell. He didn't find any. At 3AM on the first day of his confinment, Arkady finally sat down against the cold, humid wall to wait for a new development.

The second and third day he spent trying to provoke the people behind the camera when it was clear that no amount of investigating would get him out of there. Food came twice a day through the flap at the bottom of the door and the only sound that ever accompanied it was that of footsteps. Arkady tried to get a rise out of whoever was behind that door in the beginning, and he asked about where the others were, but he never obtained an answer. He didn't even see so much as a shoe through that flap. It was just bread, water, and footsteps. No one ever came inside the room with him.

He'd been put in solitary before. The longest he'd had to do was five days. He could do this.

It hadn't exactly been a walk in the park the last time and it wasn't easier knowing he'd already gone through this before. Arkady tried to ignore the camera when he wasn't yelling curses at it. He didn't relieve himself for the first 21 hours and when he eventually had no other choice due to his painful bladder, he doubly flipped off the camera before turning around and unzipping his fly. He made sure never to face the black lens when he was urinating, bracing himself with an arm up against one of the walls in the corner, and that was enough to spare himself the shame- at first. It was an entirely different matter when he needed to defecate on the fourth day. There wasn't space to do it any other way and he was forced to crouch facing the camera, and even though he managed to cover up his front, he still felt like an animal. Humiliation burned at his nape.

Arkady decided he wasn't just going to sit there and wait for someone to show up if that meant he was letting some sick pervert watch him shit. He returned to investigating the room with renewed vigor and cracked several nails trying to rip and pull at the fissures in the wall. He punched and kicked hard enough to shake out some small pieces of mixed dust and gravel, but never enough to widen them. He began to feel helpless, and immediately on the rise of it felt a roaring anger that these maniacs thought they could keep him caged like some dumb fucking beast. He ragingly toppled the bed over to its side, revealing all manner of bugs and unsanitary forms of life beneath it, and then proceeded to alternatively hurl invectives at the camera and hit the walls. At the end of the day his throat was raw from screaming and blood was still drying at his fingertips. 

He didn't know where Leo and Gren were. Maybe they weren't even there. Maybe they were already dead. 

On the evening of the fifth day, Arkady refused the tray of food by violently kicking it backwards before it was halfway through the flap.

"Fuck you!" he yelled. "Fuck you, I'm not eating until you tell me what the hell's going on!"

There was no answer. Irritation flared in Arkady's chest when he saw the tray get pushed back in and he kicked it again, more of the already spilled water wetting the floor.

"Are you deaf? Tell me what the fuck you want from me!"

Nothing. The tray wasn't pushed back inside and the footsteps retreated, and Arkady was left standing behind the door with an overwhelming anger buzzing at his insides. He screamed in frustration and slammed his arm against the door.

He wasn't brought any food on the sixth and seventh day, probably as a punishment for his earlier refusal. He tried to calm down and center himself. If Gren and Leo needed help, he needed to keep it together for their sake; he'd need to look out for a chance to escape and he couldn't do that on an empty stomach. Arkady started trying a different approach to the person behind the tray of food when they came back with the same piece of bread and cup of water on the eighth morning. He kept his voice level as he tried to negociate answers, tried to come off as meek, tried to make them believe they'd somehow tamed him by depriving him of sustenance or that they'd at least convinced him to be more cooperative. But it was always the same silence. He'd never been very patient, even less in conditions such as the ones he was currently in, and he snapped again three more fruitless attempts at communication later.

"Come back, you motherfucker!" he snarled viciously through the flap in the door. "Fucking _answer me!_ "

Fading footsteps, and Arkady only had his own hard breathing to listen to. 

The days after that were spent in a tumultuous chaos of burning, crackling emotions that Arkady couldn't control. He unleashed a level of violence on the walls of his cell that he hadn't attained before, leaving bloody handprints on the wall where the skin of his knuckles gave way to bone, and he destroyed the dirty, stinking thing that was supposed to be his bed. He hadn't been sleeping much, the air was cold, the light was always on and he could feel writhing shapes beneath his body when he lied down. Arkady knew he'd been here for longer than he'd ever been put away in solitary before. He felt that the walls were gradually closing in, that the room was getting smaller every hour even if he knew rationally that it couldn't be the case. He was going stir crazy. He needed to be outside, had never been one to keep to the interior of the ship all day, never mind a space as small as this one. 

Where the fuck were Leo and Gren? Were they dead? Had they just left him behind? Arkady knew he wasn't the most important asset to their team but Leonida wasn't the type to abandon anyone who still proved useful. She needed him. Grenelant couldn't do what Arkady did. It had to be that they either were in the same situation as him or just hadn't found him yet.

"Just talk to me! _Fucking talk_ to me!" he screamed at the camera and at the foosteps, desperation tinging his voice despite his best efforts to hold onto his anger.

There was never any answer.

No one was coming.

Arkady tried to break the small flap at the base of the door multiple times, but it was sturdy and he was only flesh and bone against unyielding metal. Thick curses tumbled from his mouth each time a new nick appeared on the inside of his fingers, and in the end the only change that was brought to the flap were the deep rusty stains that lined its edge.

Arkady's heart started acting up in occasional palpitations that grew in frequency, and headaches began gathering at the center of his brain. He felt like the blood was pulsing much too fast in his veins, like his body was constantly in overdrive, and he wanted to bite at his wrists so it would stop. The food kept coming but the bread didn't taste like anything anymore. He needed more than the sound of his own angry voice. He needed someone to talk to him. He needed to see another person's face, he needed to see Leonida, where _the fuck was Leonida?_

Growing increasingly desperate each time he heard the footsteps, Arkady started pleading with them.

"Talk. Say anything, I don't care what it is, just fucking _talk_ dammit."

They never did, and he'd scream and rage against the metal door as they walked away.  
"Come back! Come back here and _talk to me, you motherfucker!_ "

As soon as they were gone, Arkady would stop his screaming and slump back down to the cold, grimy floor.

He started having hallucinations sometimes around the middle of the- second? Third week? He wasn't sure. Days and nights tended to blend together now. He knew the camera could see him even if he covered himself when he needed to go to the hole. Sometimes he saw familiar shapes at the edges of his vision and his throat would seize up because he remembered what it had been like before. Other times Arkady looked down at his body and didn't recognize it. He stripped down without a second thought to check, only belatedly remembering there was a camera watching him and that they'd know. But they already did, anyway. Didn't they?

He couldn't sleep. He was going crazy.

He wasn't truly thinking that time when he started scratching at the walls in a wild frenzy, feeling trapped, trapped, trapped.

He stopped paying attention to the camera when he understood that the camera didn't matter. He'd also stopped looking at his watch sometime ago. The numbers were meaningless now.

Arkady sometimes could feel his ribs open up to let his pounding heart leap outside of his chest. 

He traced the red outlines on the dirty walls with his fingers, and the scars that lined his skin, and it somehow soothed him when he usually couldn't stand looking at them. 

At one point Arkady's breathing became shaky and it stayed that way. He didn't eve know why it sounded so ragged all the time. The walls were always closing in. He sat next to the door and didn't move, occasionally rocking back and forth as he pressed his fingers to the irregular ridges of his skin. He'd get out eventually, right? They had to let him out eventually. They wouldn't keep him alive if they didn't need him. His throat kept catching on dry sobs and he hadn't cursed for days. There was no point to it anymore. Arkady wanted to hear a different voice than his own but listening to it sing an old Russian melody from his childhood was better than suffering the complete silence that crushed him when it stopped. The tune was scratchy and often slipped off-key, but at least it was noise. At least it was noise.

The door slammed open and Arkady's head jerked up, his heart skipping a beat at the crash of metal against concrete. His brain didn't catch up to what was happening until he was already being hauled upright with his wrists bound by a featureless and humanoid person, their face hidden behind smooth gray headgear. 

"Wh-What- Where are you taking me?" stammered Arkady. His voice was wretched.

They didn't answer and Arkady felt a pit in his stomach that they'd do this to him even now. He stumbled in the corridor as he was pushed forward, his legs protesting against the sudden movements after such long disuse, and the individual dragged him along without a second glance. Arkady did his best not to trip and fall face first on the floor. He still couldn't control his breathing. They moved through long narrow corridor after long narrow corridor, all of them musty and dim. Arkady couldn't see shit after spending so long in that single, constantly lit cell. They took several turns in silence and stepped inside another room that was bigger than Arkady's cell, and his eyes widened in a reflection of Leonida's expression.

His mouth fell open in shock and he whispered in a still unstable voice: "Wh... What did they _do_ to you?"

She went to answer, her jaw shifting beneath the bruises that littered her face, but one of the individuals plunged their hand in the hole that had been pried open in the synthetic section of her chest and Arkady cried out in horror when he saw the brutal way in which they were handling her.

"No, stop!"

Leonida's face was constricted and Arkady lunged forward to stop the torture, but a strong, bruising grip around his arm forced him to stay where he stood. He snarled out a curse with renewed vigor in the face of his captain's distress and kicked out behind him. It earned him a solid blow to the back of his already pounding head and he slumped, ears ringing in harmony with Leonida's low groans. He'd wanted to hear her voice, but not like _this._ Now he just wanted it to stop.

"Look at him," spoke a guttural voice from behind Arkady. "He has little fight left in him. He's waited for you two weeks, how much longer do you think he will last?"

The words were like a blow to Arkady's gut. Two weeks? He'd only been in there for _two weeks?_ Arkady lifted a wild gaze to Leonida. She'd found him in two weeks, Grenelant was nowhere to be seen, that had to mean something. Did she have a plan? Was Gren waiting somewhere outside for her signal? 

Despite the strained furrow of her brow, Leonida's brown eyes were trained on Arkady and it looked like she was trying to tell him that they'd make it out somehow. Arkady believed her. He had to believe her. Their captor was right; Arkady wasn't sure if he could handle much more of that terribly silent captivity, whether physically or mentally. He felt weak even with adrenaline coursing through his veins and Arkady remembered that even though they hadn't exactly let him go hungry, two pieces of bread per day made a pretty crappy diet.

"You can be repaired, monstrosity that you are," continued the deep voice. " _He_ will soon fall into insanity and there will be no easy way to fix that. Tell us."

Leonida teared her gaze away from Arkady to look up at the person behind him. Her jaw clenched and she curtly shook her head in refusal.

Their captor was silent for a bit, and then said: "That is unfortunate." Arkady was manhandled back to an upright position and forced to look at his captor's featureless mask. "Maybe simple isolation is not enough."

Arkady realized with a jolt of dread when his captor started pulling him away that he was going to be put back in that cell, alone, for longer, and in worse conditions.

"No," he murmured. "No, wait, not again, no-" His voice faltered when they tugged on his bound wrists but he frantically shook his head, and he looked over his shoulder to call out to his captain. "Leonida! What do they _want?_ Leonida! _Leonida!_ "

But they were twisting and pulling at her delicate components now and her head was bowed, long blonde bangs hiding her face, shoulders tense, and Arkady was dragged away despite his struggling and broken yelling. Neither of them were going to see or hear each other again for some time.


	7. Hostage Situation - Part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompts: Hanging by the wrists, Rescue
> 
> This chapter is pretty violent so proceed with caution!

Leo was only left alone for a handful of hours at a time and even she felt the lack of sleep settling heavily at the back of her head and in her shackled limbs. It wasn't like this was new for her. She'd been caught and tortured a handful of times during her military service on solo missions assigned to her by her superiors, even if she wasn't really sure that the term 'tortured' applied to her considering she couldn't feel pain. Though, even if she couldn't claim to have suffered the way other soldiers had, she was ready to concede that it was still very uncomfortable to have lived through and to remember. It was very uncomfortable right now.

Leo shifted to alleviate the strain in her spine and the cuffs around her wrists clinked together. They were thick and _very_ solid, and she knew they had to be made of a metal harder than steel. Usually she didn't have a problem with the regular type of cuffs back on Earth, but she wasn't on Earth and these refused to yield to her strength. Which was a shame, because she was pretty sure that if she managed to break out of her restraints right now, it would be easier to escape this time around. These bozos wouldn't be ready for it the way they'd been prepared for Leo and Gren's arrival two weeks ago. 

Leonida knew her sacrifice of throwing Gren out of the way and yelling at him to run the second she'd seen the weighted net coming hadn't been in vain, and that the opiel was safe for now, or she wouldn't still be stuck here and interrogated every day. She was less confident about her human crewmate's condition. She hadn't gotten to see Arkady directly again since the last time, when he'd been brought in shaking and pale by their captors to make a point, when he'd tried to fight back because he'd seen that they'd pried her open and were rummaging inside of her. Leonida had wanted to tell him that it was all right, that they'd make it out, that Gren was out there. She hadn't been able to. The hands inside of her chest had stolen her voice away and she'd been unable to do anything but hunch over.

It happened daily. Leonida had gotten used to visceral disgust she felt at each and every new instance of violation. She was good at that kind of thing. It probably helped that pain just wasn't a thing for her anymore.

There was no sign of Gren coming to save them and Leo had wondered if the opiel was waiting for backup from Ophena, if he was still in hiding or if he'd chosen to bail from this stupid planet until help came. Leo wouldn't put it past anyone in the same situation. For some reason these people were desperate to put their grubby hands on Grenelant and judging from the lengths they were willing to go simply to get his location, Leonida was pretty sure that the opiel's fate would not be a good one if they succeeded in their goal. However if it turned out that Grenelant had gone and definitively left Leo and Arkady behind, she'd kill him herself.

A large hand grabbed the dirty, knotted mess of her hair and brutally tugged her head back. Leo went with it. No point in resisting. The side of her skull bumped against a hard thigh and it still pissed her off that they insisted on forcing her to kneel. They hadn't let her up even once. 

She snapped: "Hey, I can lift my head on my own, thanks."

"Shut up."

Leonida scowled at the man. She'd been tempted to bite these people a few times before but had never gone through with it. One, they all dressed in uniforms that she knew were reinforced. Two, she had the jaw strength, but her teeth were normal. It wouldn't do her any good to break them.

"Look," he growled, giving her head another shake to make sure she got the message.

Leo hadn't gotten to see Arkady directly, no. But she saw him on a screen every handful of days and his state worsened every time she got another look at him.

When they'd dragged Arkady away that first day, the captor standing next to her had told her: _"Look at how weakened we've made him already. Haven't even touched him. It'll be worse. Much worse. If you don't talk."_

She hadn't talked, because what the hell did she know about where Gren had chosen to hide?

And neither could Arkady. They kept beating him even though there was nothing he could say that would appease them. Leonida wasn't as worried for Gren or herself as she was for Arkady. The man was a soldier, he'd shown himself to be strong and resilient, but he was just a regular human. They kept hooking his arms up by the wrists as well, except that instead of kneeling like Leo, Arkady was left dangling in the air while they hit him. His feet found no purchase and his legs swung at every punch, every kick. Leonida was forced to watch an hour of this each time before the screen was taken away and she had no idea how often they actually inflicted this on Arkady, how long it lasted, or in what conditions Arkady was allowed to recover. Leo knew they didn't just leave Arkady hanging in the air like that all the time or he'd be dead already, but she had no way to know how bad it could get. 

There was never any sound on these videos, just images, as she was forced to watched in grim resignation her second get tortured for information he could never provide. She'd been told that what she was watching happened in real time. Arkady was always surrounded by two individuals and they always made him bleed. They'd been blindfolding him so that he couldn't tell where the next blow would come from. 

The quality was too shitty to make out the finer features of his face but Leo was able to tell when his mouth opened on a scream because one of them had stabbed him in the shoulder. He writhed and violently shook his head, lips moving on inaudible curses, and then a big hand wrapped around his arm and wrenched it. Leonida could almost hear the pop of cartilage and bone slipping out of place when his shoulder gave out. Arkady's whole body tensed at once and he threw his head back. 

Leonida tried to look away but the fingers curled in her hair forced her to watch again. The torturer pulled the blade out of her crewmate's body and Arkady went limp, his head lolling to the side and then dropping to his heaving chest. Leo knew hanging by the wrists made breathing very difficult. Blood trickled from his shoulder all the way down to his feet, where it steadily dripped on the stained ground below him. The one in front of him stepped forward and slapped him. Arkady's body rocked to the side from the force of the blow but he didn't jerk away. 

"He's passed out," murmured Leonida.

They slapped him again and Arkady still didn't react.

"He's passed out," Leonida repeated louder.

They followed up with a punch to the gut, so brutal that the blood dripping from Arkady's feet flew out in a line and splattered on the other's shoe.

" _He's passed out_ , you fucking idiots!" roared Leonida at the screen, and then she yelled at her captor: "Make them stop! He's out of it, he won't be telling them anything like that!"

The featureless helmet just stared down at her and the man slowly shook his head. Leonida ragingly tugged at her restraints, the chains preventing her hands from coming down. She hated that she was strung up so tightly she couldn't even elbow the guy. Out of the corner of her eye she could see that they were still beating Arkady.

"He'll _die_ if you keep going! You're going to damage an organ, he won't be coming back from that with _your_ shitty technology!"

"Shut up," dryly said her captor, and he punched her.

Leonida's head snapped to the side and she saw in the blur of the bright screen that more blood had pooled on the ground beneath Arkady. She gritted her teeth and hunched her shoulders to try and lift herself off the ground, but the chains tying her thighs down were too strong for her to break.

"Fuck," she cursed to herself. She'd never forgive herself for letting Arkady die alone if they killed him.

The man's hand withdrew from her hair and he went to pick the tablet up again. Leonida hoped that meant the others would get the signal to stop before it was too late, but the anger and fear burned her from the inside-out. Arkady was only human and Leonida didn't know if he'd ever had to endure torture that violent before, if he'd ever had to go through any kind of constant pain for so long. She could tell that the only reason Arkady was even still alive was because they'd quickly figured out that while she didn't respond to regular torture, seeing her second get abused got more of a rise out of her than anything else could have. They all knew that Arkady had been useless to them from the start, except to lure in Leonida and Grenelant the first time, and now to make a point to Leo.

"Stop doing this! Leave him alone already, you're only going to kill him at this rate!"

He faced her. "Then talk."

There was nothing Leonida could tell them about Grenelant's current whereabouts and she'd told them that much, but they refused to believe that she was truly that clueless. Maybe they had an inkling of it but she was their only lead so they preferred not to consider it. Probably they just got their rocks off to doing this shit every day. 

Leo gritted her teeth and snarled: "Fuck off."

Her captor's shoulders slowly shook in a low laugh, and then he turned away and left.

* * *

Something happened the next day. This time it was a different individual who'd decided to devote their morning to torturing Leo and he'd spent a good chunk of two hours slowly breaking one of her wrists by gradually tightening the cuff around it. They may not have had the most advanced modern technology but they had some pretty terrible medieval-level devices that Leo hadn't known about until they'd realized she'd be difficult to damage in some spots. They hadn't even changed the restraints, which were apparently adaptable to the small wheels they'd screwed into the holes Leo had noticed on the cuffs. He was in the middle of monologuing about how it would be easier if she just told them where the opiel was when another one came into the room.

"We got it."

He let go of the wheel on the second cuff and straightened. "The opiel?"

"Trade was done early today. No need for them anymore."

Leo felt a rush of dread from the top of her head to the tips of her fingers. Grenelant was supposed to have escaped, he was supposed to get them out of here. Maybe he'd ran into trouble earlier and hadn't managed to come into contact with anyone that could help. And now he'd been caught, and Leo didn't know where he was or what was going to happen to him, and they'd just said they were done with her and Arkady- _Shit. Arkady._

"What do you mean?" she asked. Both figures turned to her and she scowled at them. "What do you mean, a trade?"

Neither of them answered her question. The one who'd come in told the other: "Get rid of that one, she's no use. We'll discuss about the other with the rest."

"Not getting rid of the human?"

"Some want to keep him."

Leonida snapped: "You're not _keeping_ him, you sick fucks! He's _my crewmate!_ I'm not gonna let you-"

A boot came flying up and kicked her head back, and then there was a familiar metallic sound and Leo looked up to see the muzzle of a gun trained on her face. 

Her thoughts picked up a dizzying pace as she realized what was about to happen. They were going to execute her. They knew her body was resilient to gunshots. They'd never tried to shoot her in the head yet. They couldn't be sure the structure of her face was also reinforced. It was weaker than the rest of her. She needed to protect her eyes. She could stop breathing for minutes at a time and didn't have a heartbeat. She could fake this.

The gun went off just as Leonida jerked her head back to angle her face to the side. She felt the bullet dig itself between her temple and the tail of her brow, tearing through the superficial layer of her skull and crumpling the second. Her head fell forward and her body went lax, cool liquid trickling down the side of her forehead. Leonida closed her eyes and stopped breathing. She wasn't dead yet, but that had been way too close for comfort. Their guns packed a meaner punch than those she'd seen in the military did. Leonida thought of J, what would happen if she messed this up, and then focused on the sound of footsteps circling her.

"Where are you going?"

"Reporting to the rest. Why?"

"Help me throw the body away, at least."

Leonida heard clinking sounds and felt the chains scrape against her legs for a few seconds before they slipped away, and then they opened the cuffs and let her arms fall one at a time. She waited for her feet to be freed. When the last retraint stopped pressing down into the back of her ankle, Leo's eyes shot open and she pushed herself up on her elbows to kick her leg out to the side, her weighted calf hitting one of the men in the ribs like a battering ram and sending him sprawling. 

"What-"

Leonida jumped to her feet and grabbed the other by the throat to slam him in the ground, the palm of her hand exerting a twisting pressure into his throat against the cold, dirty concrete floor. She felt a satisfying snap resonate up the bones of her good hand and let go of the body, spinning around to leap at the enemy that was struggling to get up on the side. Leonida's fingers curled around his shoulder and her foot crunched through the metal cap that protected his knee. He lost his balance with a shout of pain, she threw him to the ground and held him there.

"Tell me what the trade was."

His arm moved and he scrabbled for his weapon, but she tore it from his belt and slipped the hard muzzle in the crack between his helmet and his vest.

"Who did you trade off my crewmate with?"

"Wait! Wait, I have a family-"

"Great, I don't care. Speak up, quick."

"Don't kill me," he begged, and she could hear his voice tremble with fear. "I'll tell you, just don't kill me!"

"I'm listening."

"One of the royals wanted him! We're just hunters, we find what clients ask of us, that's it!"

"Who's that royal? Got a name?"

"Harkrdall, the son, he asked us to capture it-"

Leonida pulled the trigger and there was the sound of brain matter splattering against the inside of the helmet. 

She retrieved the gun and fluidly stood up to survey the scene. She needed to move fast. When she went to pick up the gun on the other body, Leo caught sight of her crumpled wrist and cursed under her breath. One-handed, then. That was fine, she was whole for the most part and wasn't missing any of her senses. Her odds of escape with Arkady weren't ideal considering her crewmate was likely very badly injured and they were in the middle of the enemy's base, but Leo was pissed. She'd just gone two weeks getting her insides rummaged by these bastards' dirty hands, Arkady had suffered for no other reason than his torture had been enjoyable to them, and Gren had gotten caught and sold because some rich kid wanted a giant frog. Everyone working here was going to die.

Leonida raced through the gray corridors, stealthy and fleet-footed. They'd damaged the chip at the base of her neck that allowed the helmet activation and color shift functions of her suit, but at least she was stuck on the drab earthy colors she'd selected on her way here with Gren instead of the default brightness. She didn't know where Arkady was kept and she didn't want to run across the base blindly so she had to find a control room. This hadn't been a big building when both of them had come to get Arkady back so she knew what to expect. She came across seven more enemies that she dealt with in kicked chests, snapped necks, broken legs and bullets lodged in weak spots. Their uniform didn't have that many and those that she'd been able to make out during her captivity were small, and even if she was generally a good shot, she wasn't great with tiny targets. She missed several and ended up having to resort to hand to hand combat nearly every time. The broken wrist was a pain, but she compensated by ramming her elbow in their more exposed areas. Her blows were all meant to tear, break, smash through her enemies. They were meant to be lethal.

A long time ago, Leonida had been told that it was odd that she had the ability to kill without feeling guilt when she was only at the very beginning of her military service; that had been after she'd terminated a head of rebels who'd been rampaging across towns of innocent civilians to loot and rape in the name of supporting their cause for freedom. You weren't supposed to be fine with killing, even if it was killing a dirtbag criminal. She'd been lead to believe that something in her head was broken, back then, something that was only supposed to break after facing numerous deaths. Maybe there had been. There definitely was now. It was the least of her worries when she was wiping the floor with the bastards that had gone after her and the people she looked out for. The only reason her suit didn't turn bloody was because all of their innards were trapped inside their uniforms. 

Leonida lucked out and found the surveillance room in under five minutes. The two goons she found inside were promptly dealt with, one's helmet smashed into the wall hard enough to ensure a nice concussion and the other's gun turned against himself as soon as he whipped it out in the small space between him and Leo. Grab the attacker's gun, spin and kneel, aim below the chin, pull the trigger. Leonida loved that move. She'd practiced it after seeing it in a video game.

Once she was done clearing the place, Leo rushed to the screens and frantically searched for a sign of Arkady. She couldn't see him anywhere. The door handle clicked behind her and Leonida spun around, swiftly stepping behind the door as it opened. She watched another figure step inside and quietly slipped in his back, bringing the same gun to the same opening below the helmet.

"I've been blowing brains out like this. Tell me where my crewmate is."

The man froze. "I- I-"

"On the map, right there. Hurry up."

They shuffled closer to the piece of paper and he slowly pointed at a cell. Leonida felt a spark of relief to see that it wasn't too far away.

"It's th-"

A bang, and the inanimate body slumped to the floor.

"Thanks."

Leonida stepped over it and out in the corridor, quickly closing the room behind her and breaking off the handle before sprinting towards Arkady's room. She only had to kill one other armed individual before finally finding it. Leonida prayed that the metal door was at most steel and thankfully managed to kick the door down after three blows. She stilled when she found herself in front of a small empty room. Arkady was nowhere to be seen. This wasn't right, maybe it had been a trap to send her here? But there was that bloody stain on the ground with the same linear splatter as she'd seen on the video just the other day. He had to be there.

Her gaze roamed around and rested on the only piece of furniture that stood next to a heap of torture instruments: a heavy chest. She noticed its size and a horrible suspicion dawned on her. Arkady hadn't kept it a secret that he couldn't handle small enclosed spaces, she'd seen him freak out in them before. Leonida lunged forward and tugged at the lid, straining against the chains that held it closed. Just like the ones that had been used to restrain her, they didn't give. Leonida stepped back and aimed at the lock, shooting three times before it finally broke. She tore the chains away and lifted the lid to find the huddled shape of her shivering second-in-command. 

"Arkady!"

He flinched away from her and started making pitiful sounds around the wet gag in his mouth where pink saliva bubbled at the edges, air whistling wetly through his nose. He was still blindfolded and shirtless, and there wasn't an inch of his pale skin that Leo could see through the blood, grime and bruises. The inside of the chest reeked of acrid waste and sickly sweet iron.

" _Shit._ " 

Leonida grabbed his bruised arm to pull him upright but he twitched violently in her hand, shuddering, choking on his own frantic breaths. His cracked lips starting dribbling blood when they moved around the halting, broken sounds.

"Arkady, it's me, it's Leo," she said louder. "I'm taking away the gag."

She quickly undid the soaked rag and he immediately started begging in a voice so worn that it was almost inaudible: " _Net, pozhaluysta, ya nichego ne znayu, ne delay-_ "

"Arkady, it's _me._ Captain Leonida Trust, okay? It's me."

She undid the damp blindfold and Arkady recoiled when the light hit his dilated pupils. Tears spilled from his puffy red eyes down his pallid face. 

" _Proshu, pazhaluysta, ne nado bol-_ "

His voice cut off when Leonida forcefully dragged him out of the chest, but he wasn't holding himself up and she had to hoist him by the armpits so that he wouldn't sag against her. She caught sight of the scars again and briefly thought about how mortified he must've been to remain so exposed the whole time. Leo had no idea how long or how often he'd been forced to stay in that chest and it scared her to see him so checked out, but they didn't have time for this.

"Private Dragunin, stand up!" snapped Leo.

The young soldier's huffing breaths were shaky, his body cold and heavy in her hands, but he tensed when he heard her order and his hand weakly gripped her shoulder. He winced, sluggishly tried to straighten, and then his legs immediately gave out. Leo had to catch him before he toppled over.

" _Fuck,_ " she hissed.

There was blood all over them both now and she could see his dislocated elbow hadn't been fixed. She didn't have time to do any of that herself, not when another enemy could show up at any moment. There was no way Arkady would be able to move with her even if she supported him and he clearly wasn't about to have an adrenaline rush.

"Shit." Leonida wrapped her fingers around his wrist, tried to ignore that it was definitely thinner now. "It's fine, Arkady, I'm getting us both out of here." 

A strangled gasp escaped her second when she pulled at his good arm and hoisted him up across her shoulders in a fireman's carry. There was no way they could both safely return to the ship right now, she'd have to get him first-aid on her own means. Arkady was completely out of his mind and Leo wasn't sure how she'd be able to deal with that, but each thing in its time. 

"Hang on," she told him. "We're leaving this damn hellhole."

Arkady had fallen silent but Leo didn't look to check his face. She still had a pulse at his wrist and it was strong enough to reassure her that he wasn't about to die on her. Leonida had noticed that the room had no windows so their only route of escape was to go back in the corridor and sprint for the nearest exit and hope to fucking God no one would stop them. Leonida ran back out and rushed to the door at the end of the hall, and by some miracle no one came after them. Maybe she'd already killed them all, maybe they didn't dare go after her because she'd decimated their ranks. The door slammed shut. Leonida fled, Arkady's shaky breathing stuttering in her ear, her grip around his cold skin slippery from the rain, and she didn't look back.

* * *

Leonida didn't have perfect knowledge of the area they were in but decided that she could allow herself to slow down after running in a straight line for over an hour. They were in the middle of nowhere. She'd expected as much, Gren and her had had to walk a long time before finding the building. Their surroundings right now were made up of boulders and rocks and mostly felled trees. It took her a while to find a good shelter for Arkady, because the first she came across was a huge burrow and she wasn't sure what kind of animal she'd have to wrestle out of there, and it definitely wasn't worth the risk of getting her human crewmate involved when he was barely awake. She eventually stopped upon finding a natural pit in the earth beneath the rocky overhang of a boulder that was three times her height. All she'd need was to roll over two thinner slabs of rock and it'd be good against bad weather. Maybe she'd fine a third one to hide them. That would be good.

First things first, however. Leonida crouched in the dirt and pulled Arkady down from her shoulders to lay him in the earth. His blue eyes stared straight ahead and never once alighted on her face, and he didn't stay laid out on the ground the way she'd lowered him there; instead his body slowly curled up in a foetal position like a dying bug, small and tight the way she'd found him in the chest. His dirty hair stuck in clumps againt his wet forehead, long enough now that it nearly reached his eyebrows. He was wet and shivering and his dislocated arm hung uselessly down his flank. The rain had washed out most of the dried blood and where it wasn't dark from bruises or red from open wounds, Arkady's skin was paler than usual. His dark freckles stood out across the bridge of his nose even in the ebbing daylight. Leo noticed that his cheekbones were sharper. He looked sick.

"Arkady," she firmly said. He didn't react.

There was that nasty stab wound at his shoulder from the day before that was still seeping blood, and Leo remembered he'd been laying on his bad side when she'd found him in the chest. Fucking assholes hadn't even been careful about that. Or maybe it had been intentional. Leonida felt her anger rise and forced herself to focus. There was another wound all the way across his back that looked older, more superficial, and it was red and puckered. Leonida remembered he'd gotten that one about a week ago. The rest of the cuts and bruises littering his body seemed to have been healing all right- as well as they could have in those conditions. She laid her hand on his shoulder to turn him over and he resisted, his breaths coming in rapid forced bursts, still staring ahead.

"Okay," quietly said Leo.

She couldn't see any serious wounds on his front from her vantage point, but there was a one somewhere on his body that had stained her suit and she needed to find it. 

"I'm going to feel for wounds."

She didn't wait for his assent because she knew she wasn't going to get anything from him in his state. Leonida slipped her hand under his flank and ran it from his hip to his armpit in search of an opening. Arkady shuddered violently when the heel of her palm brushed against one of his thick, jagged scars.

"Hey, it's okay, it's just me. I already know."

He'd started shaking more than before and wouldn't stop. Leonida kept going, there was no point in stopping just because he was having an automatic fear response. All she felt was the way his ribs stood out. She guessed that he hadn't been fed more than she had, and though Leo had refused everything that had been given to her, Arkady would have had no choice but to accept the small piece of bread and the shallow bowl of water. She wasn't that surprised that he hadn't been able to stand after spending a month on that diet and going through all that abuse for two weeks. 

Leonida searched some more and finally found a deep cut right below his right collarbone. Her fingertips came away wet with blood and she could see thick pale liquid glistening there as well. She made a face. It had felt swollen and hot, nothing good ever came of that.

Leonida finished her check-up to make sure there weren't worse injuries and decided she'd have to start with the arm. There was a risk of nerve and muscle damage after leaving it dislocated for too long, especially since Arkady had been hung up by his wrists several times for beatings which had likely fragilized his shoulders, and if the damage became chronic no healing pod would be able to fix that. Leo scooted to the side, lifted a leg over his body to immobilize Arkady's shoulder with one foot and grabbed his wrist with her good hand, and didn't warn him before abruptly tugging and twisting his arm back in his shoulder.

Arkady shouted in pain and his arm jerked out of her grasp, and Leo lost her balance trying to get off of him as fast as she could. Her ass hit the dirt while Arkady hid his face behind his arms, starting to beg again just like he had when she'd found him in the chest. 

" _Proshu, pozhaluysta, ne nado_ ," his voice broke on a sob, " _ya umolyayu tebya, ne delay etogo... Ya nichego ne znayu, poetomu, pozhaluysta, ya tebya umolyayu...!_ "

Leonida knew jack shit about Russian. She only knew that Arkady sounded miserable and desperate and it hurt to see him this way. Leonida quickly got back to her knees to lean closer to Arkady.

"Hey, hey. It's okay, it's me. It's Leo." She gently touched his hand and he violently flinched away, but she didn't take her fingers away from his icy skin. "Leonida Trust, remember? Your captain? You think I'm really annoying."

Still shuddering, Arkady slowly angled his face towards her. His blue eyes were wide and distant, eyebrows pinched in terror. 

" _Ya umolyayu tebya-_ "

"I don't know what that means, Arkady," softly said Leo over his pleading. "But I can tell you you're safe here. It's just me and you."

He fell silent and continued staring at her as if waiting for the next blow, cheeks wet from his silent crying. Leo wasn't sure he'd really understood. She'd rarely seen anyone so traumatized in her life and that was saying something. It made something heavy and cold weigh deep inside of her to know that they'd been making Arkady this way while she was only a few rooms over. She took a deep breath to calm herself and then tried to wipe the man's tears away. 

He recoiled again and immediately started begging: " _Proshu, pozhaluysta-_ "

"Okay, okay," she quickly said and retrieved her hand. "Not your face. See? Not your face."

Arkady went silent again, his breathing just as unsteady as the rest of him, and continued gazing at her the way she imagined a hunted animal would.

"God... They really messed you up, didn't they," she murmured. "Can you speak English? Do you think you can speak English for me, Arkady?"

He didn't answer. She waited. After too long had passed, Arkady's unfocused gaze started drifting away from her face.

Leo leaned in. "Arkady? Can you say something in English?"

He didn't react, and just like that, he was gone again. 

Leonida had seen this in soldiers she'd had to rescue from torture before. Sometimes they were perfectly conscious and awake even after months of nonstop abuse and turned out erratic, angry, scared, or all of the above; sometimes they had to be carried out because they were catatonic just like Arkady had been. Some cracked after a year, others after a week. Mostly, it depended on the kind of shit they'd already had to go through before and whether or not the individual was the "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" type. Leo wasn't sure exactly where Arkady was situated on that spectrum, but from the things she'd noticed while living with him over the last months, he was definitely more brittle than the average soldier in their twenties. In the end, it wasn't that surprising to her that their captors had succeeded in breaking him.

Leonida stared at her second in defeat. Getting him to talk to her wasn't the main objective for now, she had to tend to the rest of his wounds. She went to kneel next to his shoulder and sifted through the health protocols she'd been taught, and made one of her chest compartiments draw back to take out desinfectant and antibiotic solutions. She couldn't be sure that it was signs of systemic infection he was displaying with his shivering and confusion, even if it could've been only psychological and because of the cold, but she wasn't willing to wait for a fever to break out. 

Leonida quickly rubbed desinfectant into his wounds and then tried to make him drink the antibiotic. She'd half-feared that he wouldn't react and she'd have to force him somehow, but as soon as Arkady felt a drop of moisture settle on his cracked lips, his tongue automatically swiped at it and sought out more of the liquid. Leonida was able to simply hold the small plastic bottle in place while Arkady mindlessly drank.

When there was no more left, Leo retrieved the empty bottle and felt guilty when Arkady tried to go after it. Hopefully this behavior meant he'd accept solids too. Leo quickly produced a box of painkillers and pushed one out of its blister to gently shove it in Arkady's mouth. He eagerly swallowed that, too, and then his teeth grazed against Leo's fingers when he tried to find more to eat.

"Sorry, Arkady," she told him as she pulled her hand away. This felt like feeding an animal and it felt horribly wrong. She hated to see the cynical, grumpy technician she'd been trying to befriend reduced to this state. Leo had a feeling Arkady would hate it too, when he came back from this and remembered.

She needed to get him food and water but she didn't even have anything to collect rain. She needed to get him clean clothes, too, and something to sleep in. She'd have to start with making the shelter better protected from the elements of nature and make a fire. He'd survive no matter the conditions as long as she found him food and water soon, but Leo wasn't willing to see his recovery drag because he was cold and half-naked. She hoped that clothes and a warm sleeping bag would help him feel safer, too, and that maybe it would fix what was wrong with his mind. There was no way she could risk going back to the ship when she wasn't sure to have killed all of the hunters in that building, so she'd have to find supplies in the nearest town. Until then, they'd be stuck as they were.

Leo knew she wouldn't be able to allow Arkady as much rest as he needed because they had an opiel to save, too.

Leonida got up and stepped out from beneath the rocky overhang to get what she needed for a better shelter. She didn't go far and never let Arkady out of her sight for more than a few short moments at a time. After half and hour she'd rolled a smaller, blocky boulder to one side and a broken slab of layered rock on the other. It was very crude and left drafts of winds coming in from three places at once but at least Arkady would be hidden in there. 

Leonida had wanted to find foliage to cover him with but only found damp pieces of wood; what this place made up for in abundance of rocks, it lacked in any kind of plants. She gathered enough thick branches to ensure a lasting campfire and hurried back to Arkady, dropping it all next to him and then proceeding to gather stones to delimit a zone on the ground in a circle. Leonida piled everything at its center and picked up the two sharp rocks she'd selected to start the fire. Rubbing them together with enough force to produce a spark was a piece of cake for her, getting the damp wood to catch on fire was not. 

It took a while, and when it did finally catch on Leonida had to spend twenty minutes waving all the smoke away from Arkady while the wood dried out in the flames. She noticed that Arkady had dug his fingers in the soil at some point and Leo hoped that meant he was getting his bearings. Leo surveyed the fire for a little bit and once she was sure it was strong and steady enough that it wouldn't go out too early on its own, she turned to Arkady and carefully laid her fingers on the back of his hand. He didn't move, but she was satisfied to see that his skin was getting a bit warmer.

"You should sleep, Arkady. It's safe now."

Arkady's empty blue eyes had stayed open the whole time, if only closing to blink from time to time, and his tears weren't flowing anymore. Leo wondered if he'd been kept in that chest after every beating. If they'd somehow figured him out and used his claustrophobia against him to push him over the edge. If his blindfold had always been as damp with tears as when she'd pulled it away, and she just hadn't been able to see it on the grainy quality of the surveillance feed that she'd been shown. Leonida pushed the thoughts away for later, for whenever Arkady would be able to tell her.

"If you could come back in the morning, that would be really nice. It's lonely when you're not grumbling."

He didn't show any sign that he'd heard her. Leo stayed crouched before him in the same position for a while then eventually shifted on her feet to go lay down at his back, carefully keeping a few inches of distance between Arkady's ruined skin and the front of her suit. Leonida didn't emit as much heat as humans did and she briefly thought about the way J complained in winter because the material of her suit got cold. Right now it was warmed from tending to the fire, and she was at least preventing Arkady's back from being exposed to the chill of the windy drafts. 

"I hope you're closing your eyes," she told the back of Arkady's head.

He didn't answer, of course, didn't even twitch as his curled-up body continued its steadfast trembling.

Leonida herself stayed awake through yet another night.


	8. Hallucination/Reality

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning! Non-con touching, short instance of dehumanizing comments, victim thought process caused in part by past trauma. This one's a bit heavy, lads.
> 
> Prompt: Loss of Faith

Arkady wasn't within himself anymore. He was dancing with the flames of the low fire that was still too bright and was hurting his eyes, or sweeping the night with the cold wind, or crawling with the bugs in the dirt beneath him, or sitting high above on the rocky slabs that constituted the roof he was laying under. Anywhere but in his body. He'd rather be anywhere but in his body. It was quiet, the fire which was supposed to crackle was silent to Arkady and there was a low buzz muffling the sounds of the world since some time earlier. There'd been a loud bang back there, an explosion of metal that had hurt his ears, and then a thin high-pitched ringing that had gradually devolved into this persistent buzz. He knew he'd heard an order yelled at him from a distance at one point and he'd tried to obey, but moving had caused him pain.

He'd seen the familiar face of the person he'd wanted to rescue him but it was all so blurry, and they'd hurt him, and he still hurt. The soil was soft and cold in the furrows dug by his fingers. Arkady understood that this meant he wasn't in the box, and there hadn't ever been a fire in that room, but he was afraid to let himself hope like before. He knew he'd seen Leonida just because he'd wanted to. None of this was real. Arkady had had so many hallucinations, he could only wait for this one to be over when they'd come pull him out of the chest again. Even during the vision he'd felt them prodding at his body and wetting his wounds with liquid fire, and they'd pulled on his bad arm, and they'd touched him, always morbidly fascinated by his scars.

Arkady felt cold despite the fire roasting the front of his body. He felt weak, and his shoulder ached, and his wounds burned. He wondered how long before he died. Even after all this time, even after his mind had slipped away from him, Arkady couldn't stop remembering over and over again what was happening to him, what had happened to him. Everything melded together, separated, melded again. Arkady was well aware that he'd lost his fucking mind and the way his thoughts looped was not normal but he told himself he deserved to go a little crazy when he was going through all this shit. He hadn't been trained for this. He was a military tech, not special ops for fuck's sake. 

Arkady thought, again, about how he was going to die here tortured to death and no one would give a shit. He'd always known, but to have it actually happening to him was different than the vague knowledge that he'd disappear without anyone noticing. It was terrifying. It would be like he'd never existed, even though he'd fought tooth and nail to live this life that he'd been forced into from the moment he was born, even though he'd tried so fucking hard to survive and exist. It was unfair. That was a given because life was just shitty like that but it didn't make it any easier to accept that Arkady had gotten the short end of the stick yet again, and probably for the last time. 

The feeling of crumbly soil shifted into hard wood beneath his fingertips and Arkady almost welcomed it, because at least it meant he'd stop getting tortured by these stupid scenarios of rescue he kept hallucinating. He fucking hated his brain. Arkady waited, tense and suffering, for the unpredictable moment the chest would be unlocked. He could never know how long it had been since the last time because he couldn't tell. It was always dark and quiet. He could smell, again, the stench of his own waste. Yeah. He was definitely back.

He tried to hold on, he did. But then it all shifted again and now he was back to that first room where he'd been alone for two weeks. He remembered how seeing Leonida had given him a burst of hope and he'd tried to hold on longer than before. The scenery stayed this time, he couldn't escape. He gave up and relived it again.

It had been at least two days since they'd thrown him back in that dreary, dirty gray room after they'd showed him to Leonida and no one had come to feed him. Maybe it was because they had his captain now. Arkady felt faint and he couldn't hear her. He couldn't hear anyone. He was worried about her, couldn't stop replaying in his mind how she'd gritted her teeth and hunched over with those hands inside of her body. But she hadn't looked afraid, she'd had that look in her eye like a promise that not all was as fucked as it seemed. All he could do was sleep and wait, curled up in the corner and alone, hoping that Leonida would know what to do or that Grenelant would find them.

The door burst open. Arkady startled awake, and by the time he'd realized his room had just gotten barged into he was already being dragged out by the shoulders.

"You'll talk," hissed one of humanoids in gray gear.

"What's- What-"

"Your leader thought it would be smart to escape." They turned to him and despite the helmet, Arkady could've sworn he could see the malice hidden beneath it. "But you'll talk. You'll tell us where the opiel is."

"She escaped?" he echoed, his breath short from the swell of relief cut with the weight of foreboding. If she'd escaped then she was probably safe, but then why was he still here?

"She left you behind." There was a malevolent grin in that voice. "A mistake."

Arkady stared at the expressionless visor in disbelief. "She didn't."

He obtained no answer. Arkady was forced to stumble into another room and there he balked at the sight of chains, cuffs, whips- he quickly averted his eyes, horrified and unwilling to see the rest of the foreboding apparel. "What are you going to-" His voice cut off with a grunt of pain when he was shoved to his knees, his bones grinding together in the enemy's unforgiving grip. He couldn't move his arms where they were pulled above his head.

"Be quiet."

There was a clinking sound and Arkady felt them slide cold metal around his wrists, locking the cuffs, and then the second guy walked to the center of the room and pulled down a hook. Arkady felt himself pale.

"Wait, wait-" 

A heavy blow cracked against the back of his head and he went down like a sack of bricks, laying there dazed against the cold gritty floor. They kept hitting the back of his head. It was only a matter of time before he got concussed at this rate. His arms jerked when they pulled on the chain linking the cuffs and then he was being hoisted up in the air to the point where his toes were barely brushing the floor. Arkady had only known that what was coming would be something bad. Getting the shit kicked out of him had been about what he'd expected. 

He couldn't breathe right with the way his chest was stretched out as he hung by the wrists and the blows he received to the stomach didn't help. He could feel the strain of his diaphragm, blocking his lungs, only relieved when he pulled up on his arms to allow his ribcage to expand again but always short lived because they never let him do it for long. His breathing was laboured and he could hear the steady drip of blood hitting the ground by the end of it. They'd asked him about Grenelant but Arkady hadn't been able to answer. He was still conscious. He'd taken heavy beatings like this before, so he could handle the punching and the bleeding. They lowered him to the ground. He was too exhausted to stand up by himself. He naively thought that it would be over, that they'd bring him back to his room and let him rot again. Instead they dragged him to the side of the room and opened the chest. Arkady realized too late what they were about to do when he was lifted off the ground.

"No... No! No!" He writhed to escape from their hold, the pain only an afterthought in the face of the new fear that gripped him. The chest was empty, its walls were thick. He was being lowered into it. "No! I'll go back to the room, don't put me in there!"

They didn't even answer. They didn't _care_. He fought, loudly and viciously, when they shoved him into the box. He yelled and lashed out when they forced his arms down, and then his legs, and the lid heavily fell over him. He thumped against the surface with all his might. There were raking and clinking sounds and then nothing. Arkady's breathing was quickly spiralling out of control. He was trapped and he could still feel their hands on him. He tried to calm down. He tried to tell himself that no one was here with him, he was stuck but he was alone, nothing was happening right now. It didn't work. His heart hurt and was beating too fast. The air was stifling and he was quickly unravelling. Arkady hated small spaces, he _hated_ them, and he choked on his own panic and lost himself deeper in his head.

They left him there for far too long. He only slept when he passed out. In the rare moments he was too tired to be afraid, he hummed to himself like he had during the solitary confinement they'd made him undergo for two weeks. He had panic attack after panic attack, and the darkness and silence somehow made it all worse, and he couldn't move, and he was dirty with sweat and blood and he'd puked bile on himself and his body hurt and he could still feel how they'd grabbed him and forced him in here and he couldn't _get out_.

When they came back and opened the lid, he scrambled out desperately, limbs clumsy and wild. He fell over the edge and hit the ground hard and laid there, gasping and sobbing and shaking, but never long enough to recover. They were already hoisting him up to drag him to the hook and chains where he was sure they'd hang him up and beat him again.

"Leonida," he coughed out, chest heaving as he tried to crawl away from his tormentors. "Leonida!" He knew she probably wouldn't hear him. Wherever she was, she was trying to save all of them. But he was desperate. "Leo-" 

His voice broke off into retching when a thick boot dug itself in his solar plexus. He saw the man raise his leg again, the hard-soled shoe hit the side of his chest. Arkady struggled to inhale the precious air he needed to breathe. Fuck. Maybe now he really had broken ribs. They strung him up again while he was busy dealing with his spasming lungs and didn't let him catch his breath to start beating him again. He was insensate by the time they were done with him and he barely felt the slip of fabric around his head, only realizing that he'd been blindfolded when he blinked and everything stayed dark. He couldn't move his hands to remove it because they'd been tied at his back.

"Wha-!"

Something that smelled like moldy old rags was thrust in his mouth and he gagged on it, but it only wound tighter around his mouth and nape. It pried his jaws open and pushed his tongue down, and he had to breathe deeply through his nose not to let himself choke on it. They didn't say why they were doing this. Arkady felt them pull him up again and he undestood that they were going to put him away again. 

He fought even harder than last time when they forced him into the chest, struggled like a madman, shrieking all the while from behind the gag. It was useless, they were two and he was weak and injured. His back violently hit the bottom of the chest and he couldn't see where they'd grab him next, which limb they'd push back in, so he kicked out with all his strength and he screamed in pain when the lid fell on top of his ankle with a crunch. He heard someone mutter something like an annoyed curse and the lid was opened again, his leg unceremoniously dumped back inside, and then the box slammed shut again. The pain radiated all the way through his foot and leg and Arkady tried to breathe around it as best as he could. He couldn't hum anymore, it made him taste the rag and he couldn't afford to vomit with a gag on. He didn't know if he could handle the fear this small, cramped, dark space injected into his bloodstream for so many hours again. He fervently hoped that Leonida would come back and save him soon.

It turned out that he could handle it. It was just that he handled it very badly, and when they came back for him, he couldn't stop crying because he was powerless to stop any of this. His blindfold was damp and stuffy and hot against his face. They didn't take it off that time, nor did they ever take it off the times after that. It was only ever the gag that was pried out of his mouth sometimes. They kept asking him about the opiel.

"I don't know!" Arkady hoarsely shouted. "I don't know where he-"

The blow he received to the side of his face made blood and spit fly.

"Talk!" they roared.

"I don't know," he helplessly sobbed. "Please, I don't know."

They started cutting him during his torture the times after that. 

"Please, I don't know" eventually turned into " _Pozhaluysta, ya nichego ne znayu._ " 

Arkady didn't know when the switch occurred but he couldn't turn it back around.

When his shirt was torn to rags, they pulled it off and his chest was left exposed. They touched his scars like those before them already had. Arkady fell deeper into his head and begged them to stop, please stop, please. _Proshu, pazhaluysta, ne nado bol'she._ They didn't stop, they found his scars too curious to ignore. They lifted a blade to his skin as if to started tracing the outlines.

When he came to, he was back in the box. Arkady felt hopelessly lost and disoriented. He was thirsty and hungry, they never gave him enough. His chest didn't burn as much as it would have if they'd really gone through with their threat, but his ankle throbbed and everything hurt. He felt kind of sick. Leonida still hadn't come. Arkady started thinking that she simply... wouldn't come. That maybe she didn't care for him as much as she'd pretended to. He should've seen it coming. He didn't understand why it hurt so much.

The torture and constant blindness, coupled with the constant fear of the box, were really taking their toll on Arkady's mind. He was seeing things. Sunsets across winter plains. Light so bright that it was blinding and hurt his eyes. People he'd wanted to forget. Tepid skin. Crawling. Whispers and laughs in his ear.

He saw Mays and Hardin from his advanced engineering and technology program, as if to remind him that no one really ever wanted him just in case he forgot. The two men would smile kindly at him, the truth of it a taunting and mocking thing. Arkady hated himself for having hoped that it would be different with Leonida.

He saw his Corporal and his Sergeant. The look in their eyes told him that he deserved this.

He saw shadows and smiles above him as he laid trapped in the small space, reminding him of his place, reminding him that he wasn't good for anything that mattered.

Sometimes Arkady was back to being a child, sometimes he was the soldier he'd grown up to become.

He saw Leonida a few times. She smiled at him and said jokes and laid her hand over his eyes like she had the time he'd almost died, or she carried him away from this place like a sack of potatoes flung over her shoulder because that was her style, sometimes they'd find Grenelant aboard the ship and they'd all eat and drink together and Arkady would feel safe. He ended up crying his heart out every time he returned to reality. They were the worst hallucinations.

His tormentors put a gun in his mouth, once, he recognized it quickly despite the blindfold when he tasted oil and coldness of metal. The familiar fear tetanized him, but this was different, there would be no consequences for them if they decided to pull the trigger this time around. That was when Arkady understood that they'd kill him eventually. He was just there to distract them as long as he stayed alive because they liked seeing him in pain. Of course, they'd all understood Arkady was of no use to locate Grenelant very early on. There was no other reason they'd keep this going if they didn't enjoy it. Arkady wanted to cry again. He was so tired of being used.

"They want to keep him," said one of the voices at one point in time Arkady was unable to situate.

He was laying shivering and unmoving on the ground below them. Something had been wrong with him for a little while, that he was certain of. Fever maybe. 

"Why?"

"Expressive and resiliant, good for venting off steam. Apparently they're easy to train into pets."

A pause. "Not surprising. This one's gotten tame."

Arkady heard the crunching of a sole digging into the gritty ground as someone crouched next to him and he flinched away when he felt fingers touch his bruised and swollen face. He'd stopped trying to repress his flinches a long time ago. The fingers moved up to grab his overgrown hair and tugged his head off the ground, baring his throat. Again. Arkady tried not to choke on his blood and fear.

"Do you think you'd make a good pet?" asked the voice.

Arkady didn't have the gag on but he didn't answer. He couldn't stop shaking, he couldn't stop hurting, he was afraid that he'd get hit again if he spoke. A hand gripped his chin and he heard a humiliating whimper claw its way out of his throat beyond his control. He was just so afraid that they'd do worse.

"We'll see," said the voice in his stead anyway, sounding darkly satisfied. Then he felt the presence move and the hand disappear. "Let's put him away."

Arkady didn't fight it anymore. It hurt too much and he couldn't stop them. He was too tired, anyway. He wondered if this meant they wouldn't kill him yet, and how long he'd have to stay. He was so tired that dying even sounded appealing.

There was a hand on his arm. Arkady opened eyes which he hadn't realized he'd closed in the first place and his gaze shot up to the shadow looming over him. He recoiled, instantly trying to plead for them to stop hurting him, his own voice sounding muffled in his ears. He didn't think, the words just spilled out of his lips. He only stopped when he felt that hand slip down from his arm to his hand and gently squeeze. Confused, he blinked and then peered at the shadow's features in the dimly lit space he was lying in. He recognized Leonida. She looked concerned for him and Arkady felt his heart throb upon realizing that he was hallucinating _again_. He quickly pulled his fingers away from that hand and tried to get away, but as soon as he moved, his body woke up and clamored in pain. One of his weakened arms folded beneath his tender shoulder and he caught himself with a grunt. He felt more than he saw his captain crowd his space, wanted her to get away, snapped: " _Ukhodi!_ "

Leonida shouldn't have understood and yet she pulled back all the same. Arkady closed his eyes in dismay. He hated these. He rarely realized when he was hallucinating but when he did, it wasn't always easy to get out of the simulation. It felt so cruel. He felt so weak. He wanted to cry. Arkady curled up in the soil and wished it didn't all feel this real. He wanted to leave. He was tired and it was even more draining to know that Leonida wasn't going to save him no matter how much he wished for it.

He felt vibrations through the earth and gray light spilled across his face. It caused the very back of his eyes to twinge and he screwed them shut tighter. He didn't understand why light so often hurt his eyes every time he hallucinated it, given that it was never real. A shadow moved and he felt a presence at his side. The hand hesitantly reappeared and Arkady didn't have the strength to shake it off again. He was torn between ignoring everything or allowing himself to have this little bit of reprieve from reality, even if it wouldn't last, even if it would hurt all the more to be torn away from this sliver of solace. The sob caught Arkady by surprise and jostled his painful ribs, and he grit his teeth with a low groan. Tears had started trickling down his cheeks without him realizing. The hand became more insistent and pulled at him, not brutally like his tormentors did, but by small jerks as if to convince him to go along with it.

"Arkady, look at me."

Leonida's voice sounded like it was coming through miles deep of water but Arkady couldn't stop his automatic reaction of looking up when he heard it. Leonida's face was illuminated by the cold daylight. Her honey blonde hair was a dirty mess, her face bruised and caked with dried blood, her brows were furrowed in grim concern and her brown eyes were staring at Arkady in a way that made him feel like he was the only thing to exist at that moment. She'd never looked this rough when he'd seen her before.

"Can you hear me?"

Arkady frowned, lost. She looked like someone who was speaking loudly but he didn't hear her at the same level of noise as he expected to. He opened his mouth, closed it again. There was no point in interacting with any of this when it would all be gone soon. Arkady slumped back to the ground and dismally stared at the ashen pieces of wood in front of him. His body and mind felt too worn for him to do anything, anyway.

"Hey! No!" She shook him by the arm with more force than before. Arkady frowned at his captain. She hadn't been this annoying before. "Yeah, I know," Leonida said as if reading his thoughts, which she probably was because she was a goddamn product of his own brain, and she leaned in closer. "Can you speak English for me, Arkady? Tell me something in English."

Arkady didn't want to speak but he also wanted to be left alone. He realized he had to really think on it to switch languages, and it felt strange to shape English words on his tongue after what felt like an eternity of disuse. He managed: "Stop it." He could barely heard himself over the buzz in his ears.

She frowned. "I'm not hurting you."

"No, not..." Arkady clenched his fists against the dirt, his bad shoulder twinged unpleasantly but it wasn't hurting as badly anymore. "Not that. Go away."

"Seriously? _Now_ you're pulling the solitary, brooding bad boy card on me? Earth to Arkady, you'll die if I leave you alone."

Arkady brought a heavy hand to his face. He didn't feel a blindfold. Strange. No, it made sense that there would be no blindfold in a scenario that was taking place in his imagination.

"Arkady," repeated Leonida insistently. "Do you know who I am?"

Arkady felt a hysterical laugh bubble up without warning. As if he'd ever forget. He also felt like sobbing uncontrollably. Ultimately he choked out: "Go away."

"Arka-"

"Just go away!" he screamed, his hand coming away from his eyes to bat at the apparition. It weakly hit a firm body. Arkady wavered, but he'd felt Leonida's solid shoulder beneath his stomach before when he'd hallucinated that escape. He couldn't trust any of this. Arkady pulled his hand away and begged: "Just go away already. I can't do this. I can't." 

Leonida reached out to grab his hand and worriedly asked: "You can't do what, Arkady? What are you talking about?"

Arkady's wet gaze dropped to the tan fingers curled around his pale hand. He slowly shook his head. "Stop, please. You're not real. Stop." His eyes burned more, he lifted his other trembling hand to hide his face, to muffle the waver of his voice. "Don't do this to me. Don't... do this to me."

He felt Leonida hold him with both hands now, her grip tightening around his fingers. "Arkady, I'm _real._ "

"Stop," he brokenly whispered. "Please."

"No," she vehemently said. "No, I'm not stopping. I got you out of there and we're going to get Gren back too, and then we're getting off this stupid planet. This is real, it's as real as it gets! You know how many guys I killed back there? If they're smart, they'll know not to come after us. I'll end the rest of them if they do."

Arkady didn't have the strength to look at her. He couldn't let himself hope, not after all this time. Leonida had left him behind to be tortured and Arkady had come to terms with the fact that she wouldn't come back. He'd already lost his faith in her. Arkady never had a lot of faith at all, generally speaking, but right now he felt entirely devoid of that warm little light. He felt no hope of it ever coming back.

One of Leonida's hands came away to coax his arm down. "Hey. Look at me." Arkady was too weak to keep his arm up. He let her pull it away and blankly stared at his captain's face. Leonida seriously said: "You're out. They're not going to do anything to you anymore, you've got my word."

Arkady slowly nodded. He didn't believe her, but he had little choice other than going along with this.

Leonida nodded too, looking satisfied. "All right. I think your hearing is a little compromised because I shot a gun right next to you, but that's usually temporary. I took care of your wounds as best as I could. How's your shoulder?"

"Weird," flatly said Arkady.

Leonida moved her hand up to brisly trail a light finger down his shoulder. "Do you feel this?"

"Yes."

She continued circling his skin from the top of his shoulder down to his elbow. "Everywhere?"

"Yes."

"Can you move your arm?" Arkady could. He winced when he had to lift it high up but otherwise, Leonida seemed content with his mastery over his own limb. She said: "That's better than I hoped, honestly. We'll see if you have any lingering damage when we get to a pod." Arkady said nothing, and Leonida continued talking. "We'll have to watch that wound at your collarbone because it looks infected. I gave you antibiotics and desinfected all I could but you'll have to let me help you with that again later. All right?"

Arkady nodded.

"We have to get you food and water, and clothes too. Going back to the ship right now is dangerous so I was thinking of heading to the nearest town. I don't think you can walk there. Can you?"

"My ankle's fucked."

"Try to see if you can at least get up."

Arkady slowly pried himself to sitting and then painstakingly gathered his legs beneath him to stand up, but his body hurt too much and he had to take a pause to breathe through it.

Leonida's hand appeared in front of his face. "Here, painkillers. We'll try again once they start acting."

Arkady glanced at her, then leaned back and wordlessly took the white pill to eat it. It stuck to the back of his palate for a little bit until he managed to swallow it down for good, where it then stuck to someplace in his throat. Leonida didn't say anything the whole while, she just stared at him. Arkady almost though that she was going to make a remark about how quiet he was being. She didn't. Instead she said: "It's fine if you can't walk, I'll help you there."

Arkady stared down at the dirt. Eventually he spoke. "You said we had to go find Grenelant."

"He got himself caught. I want to call him an idiot but there's probably a good reason it happened. At least we got out thanks to that."

Arkady continued emptily gazing at the ground and then slowly lifted his eyes to Leonida. 

"...We?"

His tone of voice seemed to alert Leonida. She carefully asked: "Is something wrong?"

Arkady scrutinized her and then murmured: "They said you left."

Perplexed, Leonida said: "What? When?"

A sick, heavy feeling settled in Arkady's gut. "What happened to you after they pulled me away?"

Leonida's expression grew even more cautious. "They continued fiddling with me in an all-around uncool way and kept wanting to know where Gren was. I couldn't answer, obviously." Her voice grew a tiny bit quieter and he had to strain his ear to hear her. "I know they tortured you during that time for the same reason."

Arkady felt cold, like all the blood had leeched out of him. He blankly repeated: "They said you left."

Leonida's features shifted in dawning realization, and she said something in a voice too low for Arkady to hear, but he could tell the gist of it from what she'd told him and her expression. _You thought I'd abandoned you?_

He'd believed them. He'd believed them and even before believing them, he'd only been desperate for Leonida to get him out of there without even thinking of the things she might've been going through herself. He felt wrong. Stupid, guilty, so fucking naive and ungrateful. Mostly, Arkady felt like he was going to be sick. He pressed a cold hand to his dry lips and tried to breathe in to calm himself.

"It's okay," Leonida was hurriedly saying in front of him. "It's okay, I don't blame you for believing them, it's not like the situation helped you think otherwise. That was their goal, Arkady. It made it easier to kick you down if you didn't have any hope left."

"Well it fucking worked," growled Arkady with dejected asperity, angry at himself because he'd fallen for something so obvious and given up so soon. And yet still, at the back of his mind, resided the certainty that none of this even mattered; that Leonida was somewhere off in space with Grenelant and Arkady was still stuck in the chest waiting for more torture to be inflicted on him until he died.

"Hey, I'm here, okay?" Leonida tried to reassure him. "We're both here and we're alive. Right now let's focus on getting you what you need, then finding Gren and getting the hell out of here as soon as we can."

Arkady nodded again, silent. He'd do what Leonida wanted. If this all turned out to be just one long, elaborate hallucination, Arkady would tell himself that he'd at least seen it coming. There wasn't much he could do about any of this when the fabric of his own subconscious didn't yield to his will.

Leonida leaned forward to catch his gaze again and promised: "You're going to be okay, Arkady. I'll make damn sure of it."

Arkady stared at her and then looked down. He felt empty. He didn't say anything at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please tell me if I've missed content warnings, I'll add them in the beginning notes


	9. Forgotten Runt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning! Dehumanization.
> 
> Prompt: Muzzled
> 
> Situated in CB's backstory

He didn't remember how long it had been. He didn't remember what his home had once looked like. He didn't even remember if he'd ever had a name other than "rat", "runt", or anything that was an insult. What he could remember, however, was a time when his muzzle hadn't been flayed raw by the stiff rope encircling it. He could remember what it had been like to be trapped beneath another body, reminisce with vengeful and desperate delight how blood has tasted on his tongue when he'd bit his attacker, and then shudder away from the memory of the big hand that had grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and the thick, fleshy fingers wrapping around his nose and mouth to prevent him from lashing out. He'd writhed like a snake, hackles raised, claws frantically scratching at the air until his small body had been lifted up and smashed against the ground with a deafening crack. 

There had been a lot of pain, back then. Now he was used to it.

Someone had screamed from afar- for him, probably. Maybe his family. The people who'd known him all had to be dead by now, and those that weren't must have forgotten. Forgotten the young runt that had to lay in his own waste and blood every day, small and famished and cold, robbed of the ability to even speak. 

He could have remembered those things, but he'd stopped doing so a long time ago. His mind wasn't a place for thoughts anymore. Only primal, visceral flashes of consciousness remained, and they were red like his oozing wounds and loud like the people that shouted and cheered on the sidelines as his jaws snapped at his opponent of the day. Those were the only times his jaws could make that sound. 

He'd spent nights and days crying, before, when missing the warmth of his home, the softness of his blanket, the gentle manners of his mama, the freedom of open valleys; but even crying was punishing and his sobs were cruelly and mercilessly snuffed out by the tight grip that forced his mouth shut. All he could do was whine softly in the corner of his kennel. Nowadays he didn't whine because he cried; he only did so to hear what remained of his voice, and even that action was not something he chose to do but the only way his body had found of calming itself down when his mind had disappeared. 

Many things had driven him to this beastly state; the muzzle was the main catalyst. He'd heard others able to scream and cry freely, but this was his punishment for biting so often. He couldn't stand the unyielding and painful lines encasing his head, squeezing beneath his ears, crushing his snout, barely leaving him any space to breathe; he couldn't stand it, and yet he could. He had no choice but to live with that torturous sensation nearly every hour. Sleeping was not sleeping, but a morcelled amalgamation of suffering and whimpers and nightmares. Drinking was not drinking, but desperate attempts at licking the floor where rain sometimes trickled, or wherever his keeper spilled the water that was brought to him once a day. Eating was not eating, but ripping and chewing another beast's muscle and sinew as soon as the restraint came off. He always had injuries from the fights but his snout was a constant throbbing, bright pain that screamed each time he made the smallest of movements. He couldn't smell anything but his own rotting flesh. 

His fur was always sticky. Cleaning it had long since escaped his realm of possibilities; he'd desperately attempted grooming to soothe his fear and anxiety in the beginning, but he could never get his claws free of blood and his teeth and tongue were trapped behind a mesh of metal and hard rope. All he could do was ceaselessly rub his muzzled nose against the wall in hopes of degrading it enough that it would snap and fall off. It never did. The inability to do something as instinctual and necessary as grooming was another thing that had pushed him over the edge of wildness.

His health kept declining. The flesh of others wasn't supposed to be the sole part of his diet, he could never drink enough, his ribs were showing and his fur was matted and torn off in patches. His skin itched and wriggled beneath the rope and the horrible smell kept getting stronger. His keeper never came close to his mangy form anymore except to kick him awake so he'd get up to fight; they didn't even try to grab him to drag him out anymore, too disgusted to touch him directly. It was obvious to the both of them that his energy was flagging, that sooner than later even the unrelenting fall of blows wouldn't be enough to rouse him. He was dying, but he had to survive. It wasn't because he was a courageous, tenacious, hopeful individual. There was no such noble reason for it. He just had to. It wasn't about living; it was about not dying. Animals did not want to die.

He was becoming slower. 

Exposed flesh he'd had no issue ripping apart in fights now too quickly moved away from his snapping teeth.

He started getting deeper, graver injuries.

It got more difficult to bite into another's hide when his jaws didn't hold the same strength as before.

He could eat less.

It was too painful. It shouldn't have been possible for the muzzle to hurt even more.

There came a day when the agony of the muzzle grew strangely distant. He was lying on his side against the wall and hadn't even moved to relieve himself, weakened and dizzy, vision so blurry with heat that nothing seemed real. Clanging and rattling of metal burst into his sensitive ears like usual, but this time they barely twitched in an attempt to shy away from the offending noise. 

There was a voice. He knew who it was but didn't have it in him to listen to the words they were speaking.

The kick in his flank threw him up against the wall like a ragdoll and he limply fell back down, his limbs too heavy to move. It hurt to breathe. He expected more kicks, but none came. Instead, the big boot nudged at him. Then his keeper crouched and tentatively reached out to pet his head. He would've jerked away, growled at the humiliating gesture, but nothing happened. He only closed his eyes. He was simply too spent to do anything at all.

"You're done for," muttered his keeper. "Shame. They liked you."

The big shape straightened and walked away.

"Someone clean up kennel seven," they called out. "The runt's nearly dead, just throw it out in the ditch."

He laid on the cold ground alone and in pain, small whines escaping his heaving lungs. He'd stopped thinking a long time ago, but there were still tears that started spilling down his scabbed fur when he understood that they wouldn't ever take the muzzle off before he died.


	10. Poor Thing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Out in the cold
> 
> Situated in CB's backstory.
> 
> Content warnings: corpses, blood, self-harm (scratching), near death

His small body laid inanimate in the humid ditch where they'd left him to freeze to death. The stench of slowly rotting corpses surrounded him. The cloudy green skies above ebbed back and forth in distorted waves as his vision blurred again and again. He wheezed faintly in the cold, tiny bursts of breath rising in irregular bursts. The muzzle cut deeply in his blistering, infected skin and his waterlogged fur pulled him down deeper in the muddy trench. It hurt. Each desperate inhale, each heave of his narrow chest felt like it might be the last. He was so tired. 

He'd stopped shaking a while ago. He didn't know how long he'd been lying there and he was scared that they'd throw more bodies on top of him, and he was scared because he was lying on top of a mountain of bodies himself, and he was scared because he knew he was about to die and there was nothing he could do about it. Something inside of him dully ached, a longing for his forgotten past, for a time when everything had been soft and warm and safe. But it hurt too much. It was too cold. It was too lonely. He just wanted it all to be over.

There was the sound of heavy footfalls from a distance, and then it stopped, and something landed in the ditch with a dull thump. A big shadow appeared on the edge of his vision moments later but he didn't try to look at it. It would be too tiring. The shape shortened and came closer. An arm, then, stocky and furry and brown, reached down to touch him. He thought of snarling. He didn't move, because all he could do was lay there and breathe slow and shallow. 

"Oh..." The arm shifted, and then a hoarse call rang out in the still air. "I've found one!"

Silence. It felt short and eternal at the same time. Then a quicker set of footsteps approached and a modulated voice from above exclaim in a pleased tone: "A fuli! How rare."

"Did I do good?"

"You did _great_ , pet. Bring it up here, be careful not to hurt it." 

Giant hands scooped him off the pile of corpses with ease. His body loudly protested at the jostling and he hissed feebly from within the thick arms that were cradling him. Pain burned anew along his muzzled snout where it rubbed against moist fabric that covered a large chest, but he was too weak to move his head away. He couldn't move his limbs to claw at the person holding him. No one reacted to the noise he'd made. Maybe they hadn't heard it. He felt everything around him move, his body rocked painfully, the person holding him grunted a few times as they climbed out of the ditch and then stopped again.

"Let me see." Fingers lightly touched the side of his muzzle, then laid on his chest. He couldn't fight against the unwelcome touch. The light voice said: "Ah, it doesn't seem to have much time left. We have to hurry."

The rocking started again. It hurt too much. Everything was spinning and cold. The voices talked but he couldn't listen to anything anymore, and then he just stopped hearing.

* * *

A soft chiming sound woke him up from his slumber. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the pale light that surrounded him in peaceful shades of green. His entire body was heavy and aching so he didn't try to move. He was lying on a firm, soft surface and it was warm. He felt very sleepy. Something flapped ahead of him and his ears pricked in the direction of the sound, a faint alarm pulsing through him. He sluggishly moved to see where the threat was standing. 

A tall, thin man was sitting in a chair in front of him. His skin was an opaque green like the surface of a pond at dawn, his ears were long and membranous, and his short feathery hair shimmered like dark oil. He wore clothes of clear blue and teal fabric draped over his arms and chest and lap. The man lifted a vibrant green gaze to him, and from the inner corner of two of his three eyes grew thin curved appendages that hung down to frame his mouth. A genial smile appeared on his lips. 

"Hello."

His voice was the same as the light one, but he was speaking in sounds that were very familiar, more than those of the language he'd used earlier by the ditch. He closed the strange flat box he was holding in his long hands to put it aside, and then he gracefully touched thin fingers to his scaled chest.

"Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Asther. I know you are a fuli, so you must have the ability to understand this language." He then gestured towards him. "Can you tell me your name?"

The fuli's mind flashed with red when he saw the hand move towards him and he snapped his jaws at it, but he was jerked back at the neck and fell over. He froze when he realized he'd been able to snap his jaws. His mouth wasn't clamped shut anymore.

"Now, now," lightly chided Asther as he tranquilly retrieved his hand. "I mean you no harm. I won't touch you unless it is absolutely necessary. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

The fuli kept a wary eye on the man and slowly, carefully sat up to take stock of the situation. He didn't have a muzzle anymore, but when his paws reached up to feel for the thing that had pulled him back when he'd lunged at the man, they touched something supple that circled all the way around his neck. He gnashed his teeth together and a low growl rumbled at the back of his throat. He knew what this probably was, but he was confused by it because it was similar to a collar but wasn't as hard or as restrictive as the ones he knew. It didn't hurt. It didn't choke him and was a bit loose, but was small enough that he couldn't slip his head out of it. He didn't try more than once because he was too tired to keep trying to push and pull at it. The fuli ended up slumping back down in the soft sheets that surrounded him. He was so hurt and exhausted that he couldn't even sit up for long. He growled low in his throat again, as a warning. The man didn't react to it.

"There was no need for that horrible device they tied to your face, but as you can see, we needed to put this on as a precaution. Poor things like you have a tendency to bite for any reason at all once we've brought them out of the trench. It is to be expected," continued Asther. "I promise that I will take away your collar once that habit of yours is gone. Now, do you have a name?"

The fuli continued eyeing the tall man, tense and on edge. He understood what was being said but he didn't answer. Couldn't.

Asther's smile softened. "That's quite all right, many don't really like to talk at first. I will call you Fenn. Can you tell me if there are any injuries in particular that are bothering you, Fenn?"

The fuli suddenly realized that while he was hurting all over, his snout wasn't burning anymore. He quickly touched light paws to his nose and felt the mess of dried blood, scabs and scar tissue beneath his fingers, but... it didn't hurt. And he felt better, not hazy like before, not like he was burning up. His vision was clearer and his surroundings were neat. He looked up at Asther, confused. Was this the man's doing?

A creak rang out and the fuli jumped, his head snapping to the other side of the room where the wooden door had opened. A heavyset individual with amber eyes and a few sharp teeth protruding from a strong jaw hurried inside. The fuli recognized the brown fur on those stocky arms and realized this was the person who'd carried him out of the ditch. 

"Asther," the stranger started, and then he cringed when they all heard a crash and shrill shrieks coming from behind him. The fuli burrowed further into his sheets, hackles raised, lips pulled back in a snarl. Now that the door was opened he could hear all the noises coming from beyond the room and he understood that there were many more people in this place. He didn't like it. He'd have to fight soon.

Asther turned to the newcomer, his three slanted eyes narrowing slightly, and said in the language they'd used at the ditch: "Cohb, I told you not to disturb us."

"I'm sorry, but Nit and Sann are fighting again, Cadd got hurt, Senn is afraid, Orn went to hide and I don't know what to do," answered Cohb in a rush. His eyes were wide and his pointed ears laid flat against his skull. "I cared for Cadd but I couldn't find Orn and I need help for the rest, they won't listen to me!"

Asther slowly pushed back his chair before standing up, the distance between them widening enough that the fuli didn't feel that he needed to prepare for an attack, and ordered: "Come with me, then."

"What about the fuli?"

"He will be better alone here than if you stay behind with him. Come."

Both men walked out and the wooden door closed on their backs. It was quiet anew. The fuli stayed on his guard for a long while before he was sure that no one was coming back yet, and he let himself fall back down on the bed. The collar didn't make noise. It was different from the metal one. It didn't hurt, just like Asther hadn't tried to hurt him. 

Fenn.

It was different from the words like "rat" and "runt". Asther had said it calmly. It sounded like a normal word. Did it mean something, or was it really just a name? The fuli gazed up tiredly at the wide ceiling patterned in dark blue lines and spirals against white ceramic. The light was gentle. He was tired but he didn't want to sleep. He didn't want to be caught off guard when they'd come to throw him in another fight. He knew it was only a matter of time. He'd have to feed soon.

* * *

"Wake up, Fenn."

The fuli jolted awake and jumped back with a loud hiss, readying himself for a kick. It didn't come. He didn't recognize his keeper until he realized that the person standing in front of him was not his keeper at all, and that he wasn't in his cell but in the bedroom. Asther hadn't moved towards him. He was holding a flat tray with four bowls on it. It smelled good.

"I brought you food. There's a little bit of everything, you don't have to eat it all if you don't want to. Here," said Asther as he slowly lowered everything on the bed. He'd changed tongues again and the fuli couldn't help but feel a little more at ease hearing this language rather than the other one. It was comforting in its familiarity and tugged at an aching spot in his chest. Still, he remained cautious as he watched every one of Asther's moves very closely. Food like this was usually a trap. He waited for the thin hands to lash out and grab him, ready to bite and claw, but they didn't. Asther simply straightened and stepped back.

"I'll let you eat alone now, but we'll have to talk again once you're done. Most importantly, Fenn, you have to know that you will not fight anymore. This is the way you'll be getting your food from now on, at set hours of the day and without needing to get hurt or to hurt anyone for it." Asther pointed at the fourth bowl, graciously and carefully as always, as if to show what he was meaning to do before even completing the movement. "This one is water. You'll have to finish that bowl, Fenn, because right now that is what's most important to your recovery. Do you understand?"

The fuli watched him but didn't move or answer. He didn't trust any of this. Asther gazed back, and then instead of getting angry for his lack of cooperation, he smiled gently like earlier.

"I can tell that you do. But you're scared, aren't you? You've suffered a lot and it's difficult to believe that all that is over now. I understand. It's all right, however, we'll keep you safe." Asther showed him the door. "You heard a lot of noises out there, earlier, and that must have scared you. They're all people like you so you don't need to fear them. When you're ready, I can even let you meet them. But for now, all I ask of you is to eat, drink, and rest. Perhaps you'd even like to clean up at one point. Doesn't that sound nice? Your fur is a mess so you might not be able to groom it all by yourself, but I could help you."

The fuli quickly glanced down at himself. His fur was still exactly like it had been in the cell, matted, crusty, filled with knots, mangled in many places and not even looking like fur anymore. He could see the filth he'd left behind on the sheets. He warily looked back up at Asther and growled. He didn't want help. He didn't want anyone getting close to him.

Asther promptly appeased him. "Now, now, don't get upset, I won't do it if you don't want me to. We're not there yet, anyway. Go on and eat."

The tall man turned around and left just like he'd said he would, and the fuli was left staring at the four bowls all by himself. The smell of food filled the air. Saliva pooled in his mouth and his stomach clenched painfully. He hesitantly shuffled out of his nest, stopped, glanced at the door. No one was coming. He looked around the room from his spot on the bed but it seemed he was truly alone. He double checked, just to be sure, and then scooted a little closer. He slowly reached out with one of his front paws, poked at the closest bowl and quickly retreated in his burrow of bedsheets. He listened closely to his surroundings. Nothing happened.

The fuli emerged again and poked at the bowl a second time, then at the other bowls, but still didn't get in trouble for it. Finally he grabbed one, brought it back with him in his makeshift shelter, plunged both hands in it and started stuffing his mouth as fast as he could. He sullied the bed with his messy eating but didn't care or notice, too busy filling his belly, getting more ravenous with each bite as his body was finally given the nutrients it had been denied for so very long. 

When Asther returned long after, everything was gone, even the crumbs that had fallen everywhere in the bed.

"You seemed to have liked the food," observed Asther as he came closer to retrieve the tray. "Was there anything you liked in particular?"

The fuli peered at him from his burrow. He hadn't really noticed if one thing had tasted better than the other since he'd been too focused on finishing everything. It didn't matter anyway.

Asther stared at him for a little bit and then lightly nodded as if something had been said, and he put the tray on the table near the chair which he sat in next. There he stayed silent, watching the fuli.

"Maybe you are afraid to talk to me," Asther eventually said in a soft voice. "Or maybe they've made you forget that, too. I wonder how long you were made to wear that horrible muzzle. Too long, certainly. Poor thing." He looked away, his pale lips set in a thoughtful line. Everything was quiet. Then he looked back up and said: "I won't ask you to trust anyone, of course, not after everything you've gone through. However, Fenn, I think it is of the utmost importance that you relearn things like talking, grooming, socializing, playing. You are not a brainless fighting animal. You are a very young, intelligent fuli. We can help you remember that with a bit of time."

Asther stood up again and went to the side of the room opposite to the big wooden door to stand at the corner where a smaller, narrower door was located. He turned to look at the fuli to show him how he actioned the handle and then partially stepped inside.

"This is the bathroom. I know fulis are very adept swimmers, so I think you would enjoy it if I ran you a bath. It would also help untangle your fur and make it easier to groom if you soaked in water for a little while."

Asther disappeared from the fuli's view, who listened attentively to the sounds of very light squeaking and then loud running water. The sound sparked sudden memories and he remembered wet grass, sunlight, rolling pebbles and a babbling brook. His dark paws in the water, wobbly beneath the current. Slick, perfect gray fur. Splashing. Laughter. 

The fuli blinked and the image vanished, leaving behind only the sight of his now damaged skin. There had been a time when he'd been perfectly healthy and happy. He remembered it. His heart ached. There had been the water currents and the wide expanses of grass, there had been others like him, there had been... It didn't matter. He couldn't think of those things. It hurt too much to think of those things when he was trapped and could never go back. He'd been caught and injured and starved and made to fight and he'd killed and maimed so that he could just survive, so he could just _eat_ , because he didn't want to die. 

But he didn't have the muzzle anymore. He wasn't in the cell anymore. There was food and water in his belly and he felt better than he had in a very long while. Strong enough, maybe, to run. The fuli was suddenly hit with the realization of what this meant. He could go back. He could find a way.

His decision taken, the fuli braced himself against his collar and pushed. It was too small to slip past his jaw, but not by much. He slipped his claws between his neck and the collar to try and pry it off, but it remained stuck. His fur was too dry and knotted for the collar to smooth over. The fuli growled to himself in frustration and started clawing at the supple fabric. He hurt himself in the process, enough to draw blood. It was only an inconvenience until he noticed that it made everything more slippery. It was helping. 

Asther stepped back out of the bathroom. "Now, Fenn, I'm going to- Fenn?"

Panic fueled the fuli's frantic attempts at escaping the collar when he saw the tall man was looking at him and he scratched at his own skin with renewed vigor.

"Fenn! Stop that!" Asther raised his voice for the first time and rushed forth to stop him. 

He grabbed the line to the collar just as the fuli finally popped his head free and rolled away from the man in a hasty, uncoordinated flurry of limbs. He tumbled off the bed and hit the ground hard enough to be stunned for a few precious seconds, but then the sound of Asther's footsteps hurrying around the bed sent adrenaline coursing through his blood. He suddenly shot up and ran. The room wasn't big and the wooden door was closed so the only remaining option was to hide under the table, and the small fuli quickly slithered beneath it. Asther didn't chase after him.

"Fenn," he called out. "I know the collar is not something you like, but it's only there to ensure you won't bite anyone. Do you understand? I am not putting it on you so that you can't move. I could let you roam freely around this room if I was certain you wouldn't try to hurt me or anyone who lives here."

The fuli hid far against the wall and waited, shaking. It wasn't that he was cold.

Asther sighed. "If I'd known you would rather hurt yourself like this than ask me to remove it, I wouldn't have put it on in the first place. Come out, please. You've hurt yourself and I'd like to assess the damage."

The fuli looked around. The table wasn't an ideal hiding spot at all, and under the bed would be better, but Asther had very long arms and it seemed that he'd be able to try and catch him either way. 

"You can hide under that table as long as you want, Fenn, but I'm not leaving until I've had a good look at where all this blood is coming from."

The lacerations he'd inflicted on his throat throbbed and he could feel blood still trickling down his dirty fur, but it didn't hurt. All the fuli wanted was to get out of this room. He watched Asther's flat palmed feet and the bottom of his thin legs move away from the bed and back into the bathroom, but stayed put. It was obviously a trap. Asther would wait until he got out from under the table to try and catch him again, and then he'd probably find a tighter collar to fit him with and there wouldn't be another chance like this to be free.

The fuli waited. There were sounds coming from the bathroom, like Asther was rummaging around in a cupboard. He felt too exposed under the table so he crept closer to the edge and, once he was sure that the coast was clear, darted to the bed and scrambled to hide far in the corner. It was darker here, but it felt narrower and safer. Asther didn't reappear. The fuli looked around yet again, hoping to find some opening he hadn't yet seen, but there were none. All he could see was the dribbling trail of blood he'd left behind. He was truly trapped in this room.

When Asther came back, he crouched next to the bed. The fuli felt his hackles raise when he saw the three green eyes stare at him, and a low growl spilled from his throat as the man's long arm unfolded closer, but all Asther did was drop some clean towels in front of him as well as some squares that smelled strongly of herbs.

"Fine, you win. I want you to stop that blood from flowing, all right? You have to clean it away with the towels and then you'll stick one plaster to each big wound. You can do that, can't you, Fenn?"

The fuli glanced at all the supplies and then back at Asther, mistrustful. What if he tried to grab him while he was distracted? He wouldn't fall for that. 

The man pointed a finger at him. "Just do it, will you? And do it well. If it's still not done by the time I come back then I'll have no choice but to do it myself."

Then Asther got to his feet and walked around the bed to go open the wooden door, and he left the room for good. The fuli waited for a bit before he hurried to the towels. He remembered how to quell a blood flow, he'd been taught- didn't remember when or how but he knew. He bunched one of the towels and pressed it to his throat where the throbbing was most intense, and with his other paw he picked up one of the strange squares. This, however, he didn't remember ever having seen before. He brought it close to take a quick sniff and scrunched up his nose because the smell was overpowering. Then he tasted it with a quick flick of his forked tongue and immediately threw his head back in disgust. 

It was definitely nothing he knew about and he wasn't sure if he really wanted to use these. He let go of the square and let it flutter to the ground, pressing the towel harder to his skin with both hands, and he waited. It started to hurt after a while, as if his skin was starting to work again now that it wasn't buzzing with nerves anymore. He withdrew the towel a few times to check, and was satisfied to note that the bleeding was lessening even without the use of Asther's medicine. 

The fuli decided that now was a good time as any to freely investigate the room since his movements were no longer limited by the collar. He scampered out of the cover of the bed and made a lightning round of the bedroom walls and even of the bathroom, and then returned to his starting point next to the bed. He looked up. The high window seemed to be taunting him, showing him the green open skies of an outside world he couldn't reach. The fuli settled on his haunches and then stood on his hind paws. His attention had been drawn to a part of the window which looked like some kind of puzzle. Even if it was obviously meant for Asther's height, he estimated that he could close the distance if he jumped to it from the table.

The fuli dropped the towel and skittered to the chair to push it closer to the table, then easily jumped up on the seat and then the table top. From there, he studied the window part. The only purpose he could associate with it was a latch but it seemed like a particularly complicated one to use, with some kind of knob and slide system. That was fine, he could figure it out. The fuli took a moment to assess the leap between the table and the latch. He wouldn't hurt himself from this height if he missed his target and landed on the ground, but he wanted to manage it in one go. He couldn't afford to lose time when Asther could come back at any moment and see what he was doing.

He backed up to gain momentum and then shot forward and lunged off the table. One of his paws slid off the latch but the other managed to grab onto it and his shoulder jerked. He quickly scrambled to hang from the window by all four of his paws for a more secure grip. He pushed and pulled at the latch in every direction until finally, he felt it give under his fingers. He pushed to slide it free and then focused on the knob. He failed several attempts at deciphering how it worked because no amount of pulling, pushing, wiggling or biting helped, but somehow he ended up actioning it the right way when he was changing positions because the knob turned between his foot and hand and he heard it click. Turning. That was what it was!

The fuli turned the knob all the way around and felt a thin draft slip between the window and its frame, and he knew he'd succeeded. He quickly kicked the latch free and swung his body back and forth to pull the window all the way open, jumped down, climbed up the chair and table again and threw himself on the windowsill. He took in the wondrous sight of the outside, felt the cold air against the wet patches of his bloody fur, stinging his eyes, and he stood there bewildered by the strange appearance of the landscape. Everything was covered in a layer of flat, pure white matter, thicker in some spots than in others. It looked soft. He'd never seen anything like it before.

The fuli shook himself out of his stupor and looked around him. The strange airy white matter was also layering the window stool in front of him so he cautiously reached down to touch it. It was cold and it didn't hurt. He scooped some up to sniff and taste it. It wasn't similar to anything he knew but it made him think of metal, somehow. At any rate, it didn't seem dangerous and he needed to leave. The fuli started cautiously scaling the way down along the wall, pausing every time he heard a suspicious noise, and he managed to reach the ground without getting caught. He hopped down into the fluffy matter, only to feel his body weight crush it into a more compact consistency. This stuff really was very strange, but he decided that he liked it because it would probably be fun to play in it with another person. But with who? It was a useless thought, he was on the run. The fuli focused on making his way out of this place and darted forward.

It was difficult. Even if the stuff was light, it still hampered his movements and slowed him down, on top of which it left an easy trail for anyone to hunt him down. He understood that the stuff was solid water because it had started to soak his fur where it melted, but he didn't care as much about that discovery as he cared about the fact that this meant he was all wet and that the blood that was washed away was staining the footsteps he left behind. 

The fuli started to get cold and his body grew numb, but he didn't stop. He avoided all the living beings he could avoid. He tried to hide his tracks as best as he could by climbing through and over shrubbery and fences, up trees so they'd break the trail, always on the move even though he had no clue where he was going. The plan was to put as much distance between himself and anyone who'd try to catch him, maybe find a place to hide and rest, and then seek out information on his whereabouts. He had no idea how exactly he'd go back to the place that he wanted to find again, but he'd figure it out.

His progress slowed considerably the longer he spent out in the cold. He was getting hungry and tired again. Even though he'd stopped bleeding, he felt weak. It was very cold and his head felt like it was stuck in the muzzle again, except there was no muzzle, he made sure all the time. Still, there was a tight sensation like a vise all around his skull. He was shaking so much that he stumbled and fell a few times. He remembered how warm he'd been in that bed. He half-wished he could be back there, if only he could be certain that no one would force restraints on him again. No, he had to go home. He had a home somewhere, he remembered that. Where there was laughter, and babbling brooks, and grass on warm sunny days. Others like him.

The fuli tripped and hit the ground, and this time his body felt too heavy to get up again. He was a bit dizzy, a bit drowsy. His tail swept up some of the fluffy solidified water as he curled up right there. He couldn't feel his paws anymore, or his face, or his back, or his belly. It was nice lying here. He was warm and sleepy again. He was so very sleepy. He didn't want to have to move ever again.

"Fenn!"

The fuli made a face when he heard the voice calling his name from afar and curled up in an even tighter ball. He didn't want to be found, he was tired of being found.

"Fenn!"

He heard soft crunching sounds and felt defeat settle deep inside of him when the footsteps came closer and closer. He didn't uncurl, kept his face hidden under his paws. He heard, more than he saw, something heavy land next to him. 

"No, no... Fenn?"

A huge hand laid over him, and then thick fingers slipped under his chin to coax his head up. The fuli blinked and saw Cohb's hulking shape looming over him. 

"Oh," the big man breathed a sigh of relief. "You're alive."

The fuli tried to pull away from him but had no such success. Cohb picked him off the ground in one hand and slipped him inside the flap of his coat, supporting him with his other arm, and then started running back the way they'd come from.

"You're one crazy kid. Why did you run off in the middle of the snow? You had us worried, you know, and I wouldn't have found you if there'd been a new draft of snow! You could've died! What do I know, you might not even be out of the woods yet. Oh, I hope you're not sick. What did you have to do this for, we've been looking out for you! No, I know, I know it's never easy but-" He stopped, and when he spoke again, it sounded like he was trying to bargain with him even though he'd been talking by himself from the start. "Fenn, I know it's difficult. I've been there too. But Asther's a good person, he saves us. He saved me, and he saved all the others, and he's trying to save you too. Please let him."

The fuli heard all of it, but he was nodding off despite the running, and he fell asleep in Cohb's arms a second time.

* * *

Water sloshed next to his ears. He was warm and floating and it smelled of flowers. There was a male voice humming softly above him and tips raking through his fur. It felt nice and he shivered at the tingly sensation. The humming stopped.

"Are you awake, Fenn?"

The fuli blinked and looked up. He was in the bathroom.

"How are you feeling?" asked Asther. He was holding some kind of tool in his hand. When he noticed that the fuli was staring, he explained: "This is a brush. I was using it to clean your fur." He lowered it to the edge of the tub. "You got into quite a bit of trouble, didn't you? I really shouldn't have underestimated you."

"Are you warmer yet?" rumbled Cohb's voice above the fuli, who twisted around and noticed for the first time that it was the big man's hands that were holding him afloat.

Asther chuckled. "Well, seeing how nimble he is, I think the answer is yes."

"He was colder than an icicle when I found him," mumbled Cohb. 

"Let's hope you didn't catch anything," Asther told the fuli. "But, if you did, it's all right. I have a lot of medicine, even if you don't seem like the kind to enjoy it very much."

It took a moment for the last dregs of confusion to clear from his conscience, but when the fuli finally understood the situation, his first reflex was to bite the arm closest to him. Cohb winced.

"Ah, there it is," said Asther as he quickly backed up. "Let him go."

Cohb complied and stepped back too, letting the fuli splash to the bottom of the tub. He quickly pushed on his hind paws to get his head out of the water, shook it hard enough to spray droplets everywhere, and then glared at them both.

"That's what you get for biting," Asther told him, and even if it sounded like he was trying to be stern, there was a smile at the corner of his lips.

"Don't worry, you didn't hurt me," said Cohb. 

The fuli wished he had. He was very fed up of getting handled like that just because he was smaller and Cohb was bigger.

"Just so you know, the latch is blocked now," Asther informed him. "You won't have a collar anymore but as long as you keep biting, you aren't allowed to meet the others in the house. And you can try to run out of the room but we'll put you right back inside. No more running out in the snow, or in any other kind of weather for that matter, until you get your senses back. Is that clear?"

The fuli sunk back into the water and quickly eyed his escape routes before narrowing his eyes at Asther again.

"I know you don't agree with it, but after you put your life in danger today, you have to understand that this is for your own good." Asther went to the door. "We'll let you clean up now. Don't get into any more trouble, all right, Fenn?"

The fuli was also very fed up of being called a name that wasn't his. He didn't think when his mouth moved around words for the first time since he'd seen a babbling brook, didn't realized he'd talked before he'd already growled: "Not Fenn."

Asther stilled, and so did Cohb mid-step. Both looked at him.

Asther smiled at him approvingly and said: "Then what should we call you by? What's your name?"

The question rushed through the fuli like a cold wind. When Asther has asked the first time, there had been no words in the fuli's mind to fill the void of the answer he'd been waiting for. Now, after slowly getting closer to his conscious self that had been beaten down by the ring fighter, the fuli realized he didn't know. He realized that he'd forgotten. He'd forgotten his own name. He stared at them with wide eyes.

Asther's smile dissipated after too long a moment had passed. Cohb looked like he'd understood what was happening from the start, and his amber eyes were sad.

"Well," softly said Asther. "You understand that it'll have to be Fenn for now."

The fuli looked down and then curled up in the warm bath. The two men left. 

Fenn miserably gazed at his ebbing reflection in the water.


	11. Intruder Aboard

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Oh good, you've finally arrived. And just in time to watch your little runt die."

"Do you think he's all right?"

Leo didn't answer straight away. Her tongue was sticking out from the corner of her lips while she slaved over a packet of rehydratable shoyu, she'd just noticed, but she couldn't be bothered to tuck it back in. She really wanted to eat ramen right about now, a little comfort food to make her earlier failure a bit easier to live with. Apparently the ramen didn't want to be eaten.

"Damn plastic garbage," she seethed through gritted teeth when it refused to yield to her aching fingers. This would've been so much easier if she didn't have useless blunt nails, but it wasn't like she could ask for help since the only other person here with her had freaking fin hands.

"Leonida."

She looked up at her teammate. Grenelant's voice was worried and she could see the transluscent appendages in his back anxiously flicking about.

"I don't know," she curtly said. Leo knew she sounded like an ass but all she wanted to do was to forget that one of their teammates was currently forced to lie in bed because she hadn’t gotten to him in time while the other still hadn't shown up, and the best way she had of doing that right now was to slip into the spicy-flavored delusion that she was back home eating dinner and watching TV on the couch with her _caro_ , not moping around in a banged-up ship 23 billion light years away from home sweet home. 

"He's been quiet for over 24 hours now. Don't you think we should go see him?" insisted Gren.

"He hasn't called for us so that means he's fine. He'll come out when he'll want to," she answered with a wave of her hand which she hoped would disperse the opiel's concerns, and then she decided to gnaw at the plastic with her teeth. Again, she wished they were just a bit sharper.

"...You know, at times you can act very irresponsible for a captain."

Leo rolled her eyes. "Like you'd know a thing about how a captain is supposed to act."

The alarm next to her hand suddenly started beeping and she startled, her hands jerking at just the right angle for the plastic to finally rip, and Grenelant winced at the high-pitched. 

"That's not the button he was supposed to press," said the opiel.

Leo swore again and scrabbled with the device to turn it off, succeeding only after four consecutive tries. Broken fingers really sucked. "He probably got them mixed up."

Grenelant pushed himself away from the wall. "I'll go see what it is."

"Wait up, I'm coming too."

"I thought you wanted to eat your ramen," he teased her with his usual straight face.

She sighed. "Unfortunately, the situation calls for a sacrifice. He probably woke up completely lost and I need to talk to him."

Grenelant nodded approvingly as Leo stepped past him. "So you can be a good captain, sometimes."

"Shut it, Gren."

He made a short, low vibrating sound that was equivalent to a chuckle for his species and both crew members made their way towards CB's room. Leo's step was swift; despite her earlier show of flippancy, she'd been feeling pretty worried about her youngest teammate. It wasn't like him to sleep so long, but then again he'd had a lot to recover from. She shook the unpleasant thought out of her head and picked up the pace. She let Grenelant take the lead when they reached the door since CB had always preferred the calmer member of their little team.

"CB?" called Grenelant as he knocked, and then he opened the door to step inside. "We came as soon as we heard the ala-"

"Oh good, you've finally arrived. And just in time to watch your little runt die."

Leo's senses sharpened in alarm when she heard the words being rasped by an unfamiliar voice and she instantly lunged to grab Grenelant by the arm, pulling him behind her in an attempt to shield him from whoever was in the room. She was the one who had the most chances of efficiently dealing with a threat out of the two of them. The figure standing in the room was stocky with an elongated neck and its scaley features were smoothed out like the being had stopped merging with a snake halfway. It wasn't the creepy face that made Leo's heart jump to her throat, however, but the long claws wrapped around CB's thin neck. The boy's eyes were wide in fear, but the delirious shine to his gaze wasn't remotely close to recognition when it landed on them both and Leo knew then that he still hadn't recovered. The reptilian being tightened its hold around CB, and the small fuli let out a choked mewl that went straight to Leo's gut. She bared her teeth without even realizing it and rushed forward, a snarl ripping out of her throat.

"Get away from him!"

She barely took two steps when she felt something curl around her leg and before she even had the time to look down, her whole world tipped sideways and her insides lurched. For one incomprehensible second, Leo was suspended in the air until her back slammed against the wall. She grunted when her already damaged back collided with the wall and one of her knees hit the ground hard.

"Did you think we would let strangers steal from us?" she heard the intruder hiss.

"I-I'm sorry," stammered CB with wide and terrified eyes. "I'm sorry, please don't kill me, I'm sorry!"

"Let go of him this instant!" thundered Grenelant.

The reptile turned to them. Leo thought it was going to speak.

Its arm shot forth. Leo heard herself yell. There was a moment of shocked silence, and then CB let out a horrible gurgle. Blood pooled around the long claws that protruded from his back. The reptile tauntingly wiggled its fingers around and the boy threw back his head in agony, a tortured wail ripping out of his throat. More blood stained the bed and spilled over the side.

"S-Stop, please, please stop, it hurts, it- it h-h-hurts so much, please!" he pleaded in between harsh sobs and frantic gasps.

Mockery and spite emanated from the reptile. It ripped its hand away from his body and CB fell to the ground with a wounded cry.

"I'm gonna kill you!" snarled Leo.

Grenelant was faster. The huge opiel lept forward and rammed the monster with all his weight, throwing it back against the bedroom's wide window. Grenelant was taller than the intruder and Leo trusted his fighting abilities, so she ignored the urge to jump into the fray and scrambled back to her feet to rush to the small body lying curled up next to the bed.

"Oh shit, oh shit shit shit shit shit." She ignored the rattle of her components when she fell to her knees by CB’s side and reached out to cradle his pointed face in her hands. "Cat? Cat? Can you hear me?"

His eyes were half-lidded and the blood flow pulsed in spurts from his torn stomach. The boy let out a faint moan of agony when Leo quickly pressed her hand to the wound and she realized with horror just how big the hole was.

"...Captain?" he said in a small voice, so feeble that she almost missed it. He was struggling to keep his eyes open.

"I'm here, Cat, I'm here," she told him, the words spilling out of her mouth without thinking.

He made a face. "Don't... call..." His voice trailed off and she feared that he'd passed out.

"Hey hey hey, you stay awake, you hear me?" Leo applied more pressure and quickly rifled through the protocols she knew. She had thousands and she knew there was one for this kind of emergency.

"It hurts. I-It hurts so much," whimpered Cat. "I'm scared... Leo, I'm scared, I don't want to die..."

It was the first time he'd called her something other than Captain, and if she'd still had tear ducts Leo probably would've cried. Her grip tightened around his thin shoulder. "You're not dying here, okay? Hold on, I've got you, just stay with me all right?"

"...I'm cold," he whispered. His eyes were closed and he was losing blood much too fast.

"That's okay, just keep talking to me, you can tell me you're cold all the time if you want. Just don't go to sleep, okay?"

"...But... I'm tired...."

She sifted through her medical protocols and finally found one that was exactly what she needed. Leo hastily sent the command to her chest compartment and a panel slid open, and a small sphere popped out.

"I know, but keep talking," she told him.

Cat was silent and her gaze jumped to his face. His features had slackened.

"Hey!" She slapped him and his eyes opened again, but he didn't even twitch. "Cat, I swear to every holy bastard in existence, you better stay with me or I will come back to piss on your grave for how many years I have left to live!"

His lips moved, and it seemed like he wanted to answer to that, but no sound came out of his mouth besides a weak exhale. They were running out of time. Glass broke behind them but Leo didn't look. She quickly slipped the bead inside Cat's body and activated the small component with the tip of her finger.

"This is gonna suck, Cat. Hold on."

For one single terrible second, nothing happened and Leo thought she'd fucked up. Then there was a light whooshing sound and the sphere blew up into the size of a baseball, instantly followed by an agonized scream that nearly saturated her sensitive hearing. The blood stopped flowing and Leo let out a sigh of relief, but it caught in her throat when she saw the tears dripping down the boy's cheeks.

"Stop," sobbed Cat. "Please, stop, I'm sorry, I told you I was sorry."

"It's okay, I'm gonna bring you to the pod and you'll be fine," Leo assured him, and she leaned down to gather his small body in her arms. He let out another bloodcurdling cry of pain when she lifted him off the ground and she winced. "I know, I'm sorry sweetie. It'll be over soon, I promise."

He was panting erratically and his trembling travelled through her hollow body like the buzz of electricity. She had to hurry. Glass cracked again in the scuffle between her teammate and the monstrosity that had attacked them and she risked a glance in their direction, just in time to watch in horror as the window shattered and both fighters fell overboard.

She lurched towards the hole and yelled: "Grenelant!"

There was no answer. A groan coming from the small body in her arms stopped her in her tracks and the conflict of priorities between checking outside for Grenelant and bringing Cat to the emergency pod had her hesitating for three seconds too long. She finally snapped out of it when Cat whimpered weakly in her grasp, and spun on her heels. Grenelant would have to wait, she already had one dying teammate to save.


	12. For The Collective Good

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Selfish
> 
> Content warnings:   
> \- Arkady's fear reaction when he gets caught by Eve comes off as very non-consensual (he doesn't want to be held in place but Eve doesn't care and does it anyway - no physical or sexual harm is done).  
> \- Violent thoughts, a bit graphic, not acted upon.

The captain landed the ship as soon as she found a more civilized planet to get access to the better technology the team needed to be able to keep going. Once grounded, it became clear that the vessel didn't have much left in it and that they would only try and force it to depart once more in case of extreme emergency. Otherwise, their very first priority was to either repair it again or find another one altogether.

Eve had been told to stay back with the little fuli while the others left to scope out the place, so they'd complied and went to sprawl on a chair to wait for the events to unfold. Eve could hear pattering up in the vents and knew that the fuli was hiding. How disappointing that playing with even the smallest of the group was considered inadmissible by the rest... But Eve needed to stay on decent terms with these weaklings, at least for now, while it remained a good occasion to lay low. They stayed put in the room without trying to seek out the fuli and instead focused on themself: it wasn't just the urge to hunt that was gnawing at them, but a strange kind of anticipatory tension. Eve didn't completely understand what they were feeling. All they knew was that it was new, and that they'd never experienced it before the pursuit that had lead them to crash on this ship. 

Eve flexed their long clawed fingers and looked down sharply at the fabric hampering the movements of their hidden pair of arms. Clothes, the others called it. Useless and utterly insufferable, in Eve's opinion, but they'd seen these on many planets and understood that it was a common phenomenon. They'd complied for one reason only, because they were aware that it would make them less recognizable in public. Eve didn't need anyone to be alerted to their presence while they were trying to put good distance between themself and their pursuers. Still, these _clothes_ were annoying, and Eve didn't remember that this part of the universe had already been approached by any of the legions; perhaps this was an unnecessary precaution to take around here. But the humans had been persistent about the clothes, and wearing the tunic and cape had shut both of them up, so it did have the added benefit of not getting harrassed for such an inane thing as walking around "naked". Why no one bothered the fuli this same way, Eve had yet to understand.

Eve waited, bored, until they heard the return of the three others. The human leader was the first to step through the automatic door and Eve noticed her suit had shifted colors to the same tone as her skin.

"Well it's the best I can do," she was telling someone at her back, and then she turned around and stopped when she saw Eve sitting there. "Oh, hey. You stayed there the whole while?"

_"Yes."_

The young technician stepped inside in turn and almost bumped into the captain. His frown deepened as soon as he saw what had stopped her in her tracks, but he didn't say anything to Eve. Instead he walked around the woman to stand next to the door and told her: "It looks ridiculous."

"Always the party pooper. Gren, what do you think?"

The opiel towered over them both as he came in and he took his time to go sit down at the table, diagonally across from Eve, before turning around to seriously consider the flesh-colored suit. He eventually declared: "It is quite glaringly obvious that you are not naked, Captain."

She threw her arms up in the air. "At least _I'm_ trying!"

"I did not say I would not try," argued the opiel.

"Right, and you totally didn't freeze like a deer in headlights when they said you had to take your clothes off."

The corners of Grenelant's mouth dipped slightly. "It was unexpected. However, I am capable of doing this if it can allow us to make progress."

Eve's attention returned to the young human standing hunched over in the corner. There was a familiar scent growing in the air which sent a discreet, rippling ache in their sharp teeth, and their senses never deceived them when it came to fear. They would have recognized Arkady's among thousands of others. When the human noticed that Eve's head had minutely shifted in his direction, he tensed and averted his gaze. No one else noticed but them. 

"Where's CB?" suddenly asked Leonida. "He definitely won't have a problem with this."

 _"In the vents,"_ answered Eve. Then they tilted their head. _"What is the problem? Why talk of clothes?"_

"Yeah, figured you'd be interested," jokingly said Leonida. "Good news for you, you get to be naked because apparently that's how things go around here. Great, right? They said it was something about pride and expression and honesty, but really what matters to us right now is that they won't attempt to trust or help us if we don't do it their way."

Suddenly, metallic scrambling resounded above their heads and CB's head popped out from one of the vents. "Do they have what we need?"

Eve almost jumped on the table out of the sudden urge to nab the little fuli out of his hiding spot, but they held back. It would be so amusing to hold him in place then, maybe pinned to the table with their claws, see if he would panic even more than the last time. A little blood. A little urine. Some tears, as fulis were prone to making, just like humans. Eve wondered why so few species were capable of crying when it was such a pleasing addition to the rest of their pain. Tears had an interesting taste and their smell mixed nicely with that of fear.

"They said maybe. Seems we landed in the middle of one of the less advanced lands of the planet so they're going to have to guide us to a big capital," admitted Leonida. She looked at her second-in-command. "It would be better if you came along. I'm not willing to trust what they think will be better for us so I'm going to need your opinion on this."

"I know," muttered Arkady. Steely blue eyes swung up to her face, defiantly narrowed. "But I'm not parading around naked for these perverts."

"They're not perverts," firmly said Leonida. "I understand if this is hard for you but you have to stay professional here."

"Easy for you to say." Arkady gestured to her, his voice hard with resentment. "You've got the whole suit thing going for you."

"So what are you saying, Arkady? That you want to sit this one out?"

"...No. I'll do my job like you ask me to." He crossed his arms on his chest. "Just not in these conditions."

Leonida mirrored his movement but put her hands on her hips instead, and she reasonably argued: "Arkady, I'm not the one setting those conditions." 

Arkady held her gaze for a while, then shook his head and looked away. It was silent for a bit. He muttered: "I don't want to do this."

"I know," said Leonida. It didn't sound like a reproach.

They were all silent for a while. Eve was confused; if getting the ship repaired or replaced was for the good of this group, why was the technician going against it? Because a single one of the conditions they needed to comply to in order to ensure this success... _displeased_ him? It made no sense that his captain was not punishing him for this disobedience, not to mention that it came purely from a place of individuality. It would be a shame for Eve to lose such a nice strain of fear, but Arkady was trying to undermine the course of action that would benefit them all. The younger human was a weak link. Why was the captain not getting rid of him?

_"You not follow the leader?"_

Both humans raised their gaze to Eve. Arkady's was guarded. Leonida's was surprised, as if she hadn't expected them to speak up. Eventually the captain stated: "You've all got the right to tell me when there's something you don't want to do. We can talk it out, find a solution. This stuff just kind of happens on this ship, Eve. It's not a big deal."

Eve's focus stayed trained on the technician and they insisted: _"You are not doing the thing that benefits all, only because of not wanting to."_

Arkady's grip tightened around himself but he didn't look away. Leonida firmly declared: "And we're going to figure this out."

It wasn't satisfying enough of an answer. Arkady wasn't defending himself. Eve felt that they were in the right, and they laid their sharp chin in their hand and observed: _"Selfish. Not good for the pack."_

A motion flickered through the man's body. A flinch, a twitch, something weak that made Eve want to dig their claws into that soft human flesh again, to tease all that delicious terror out of that vulnerable body, to pull blood and then viscera- but no, they had to keep themself in check. The undercurrent of fear circulating through the room had been whetting their appetite from the start and this conversation only set them more and more on edge. They were hungry and it was hard to reign in all their thoughts.

Grenelant turned around to look at Eve. "You have no right to question Dragunin in this way. He is capable and trustworthy, and whichever perception you may have of him will not change this fact. I pray you keep your uninteresting opinions to yourself in the future, particularly as long as you have not earned a single ounce of our faith."

"Well said," said Leonida as she pointed in the opiel's direction and shook her finger as if to emphasize her agreement. "Very well said." Her hand returned to her hip. "That was out of line and I better not hear you say something like that again, Eve. Arkady's my second-in-command for good reason. If leadership means anything to you then you won't put my decisions into question."

Eve lazily unfolded a long claw and pointed it at the technician, countering: _" **He** did."_

"No, actually, he did _not_. We were in the middle of a discussion which, if you don't know, generally includes a little back-and-forth. I hadn't taken a decision yet and it's still a work in progress, so if you'll stop being a total bastard, I'd like to get back to it," retorted Leonida a bit drily.

"I know I should come with you," quietly said Arkady. "It's better if I'm there."

"What if everyone but Arkady wasn't wearing clothes?" CB piped up from his spot above them. "Would it really be that bad?"

Leonida looked at the fuli and nodded. "We could try it like that first. I can't be naked anyway, so if they have a problem with Arkady, they'll have me to deal with first. You guys should be okay regardless."

"Maybe if they get really mad at us, we can leave them and just go steal what we need," suggested CB.

Leonida smiled. "Haven't had enough of that yet, have you?"

The fuli hid half of his face behind the edge of the vent, ears still unashamedly perked up, and mumbled: "Sometimes it's easier like that..."

"We are not stealing," said Grenelant. "I think I've made it clear that I've had enough of getting turned into a criminal while in your company. Here is what I suggest: we will respect these people's culture and if they are unable to be accepting of Captain Trust and Dragunin's inability to fully comply to their traditions, then CB, Eve and I will go with them to that capital on our own. I understand that you do not want to rely solely on their expertise without Dragunin's help, Captain, but we may not have a choice in the matter. We need all the help we can get, and fast. I don't believe we can afford to lose time in an additional conflict after everything that's happened."

Leonida thoughtfully cocked her head as she considered this, and then gave a firm nod. "Yes. You're right." She looked at the young man standing next to her. "That sound okay to you?"

Arkady looked up at her. "Would it really be fine if it ended up just being the three of them?"

"We'll make do with that if it comes down to it," asserted Leonida.

Eve didn't say anything else, but the outcome of this conversation chafed at them. Arkady had shown that he was weak in his manner of putting their collective good behind his own personal preferences. A weak link meant a weak chain, and Eve did not appreciate belonging to such a chain. If the leader was not willing to get rid of it, then perhaps at least an attempt at correction was required. 

The group didn't split up immediately at the end of the discussion and Eve stayed right where they were, closely watching Arkady from their spot at the table. The human was ignoring them. Eve didn't leave. Arkady talked to the captain and to the fuli and even smiled a little. Eve could smell that it was all an act, which was confirmed when Arkady risked a short glance in their direction and saw that Eve had never stopped watching him. The young man's features shuttered and he sprang up, nearly knocking CB over in the process, before leaving the others confused by his sudden departure.

Good.

It was easy to follow Arkady. The human's fear never completely abated and Eve was always able to track him by these means, always knew which rooms he'd been in and what corridor he'd most recently walked. Eve noticed that today Arkady's scent was particularly pungent. Maybe the human knew they were coming and that was why his fear smelled so strong. Maybe he was trying to avoid Eve and that was why he was moving around so much. Eve loved a good chase and their hunger only grew when they realized that Arkady was indeed avoiding them. They had to force themself to keep their gait slow and leisurely instead of tearing through the place the way their body urged them to, but they didn't want to act suspicious and alert anybody to what it was they were after. Arkady had said Leonida would not appreciate Eve's actions, after all, even though Eve didn't think their actions were that bad. They were simply hungry.

Eve heard a familiar set of footsteps coming from the right so they rounded the corner, and there they saw Arkady had stopped next to the wall and was facing them. They hadn't made an effort to hide their own noises so it wasn't surprising that the human had heard them coming.

"What do you want?" he growled at them.

The four claws of their feet clicked against the hard, smooth flooring as Eve padded closer. They only stopped when they were inches away from him. Arkady scowled but didn't take a step back.

 _"I am hungry,"_ answered Eve.

The human shoved at their scaled chest. "Get away from me, I told you to stop this shit. And where are your clothes?"

_"You see me without, soon, when going to the big capital. Should get used to my body."_

"Whatever." Arkady retrieved his arm and moved away. "Stop following me."

_"You left the room, where others were. You knew I follow."_

Arkady didn't look at them when he harshly answered: "I just didn't want you to stare at me that creepily in front of everyone. Get lost."

 _"No. I am hungry."_ Eve stepped after the human.

They saw his shoulders tense, noticed the small hairs on the back of his neck rise, smelled the swell of fear. Enjoyed it for a second. Arkady whirled around and punched them in the head. The blow made Eve falter a bit, but their skull was too dense for the human's fist to have made any real damage. The latter was cursing in words that didn't sound like common tongue and Eve realized that he'd hurt himself. It made them more amused than angry. They reached out and grabbed one of the human's arms before he could pull away and Arkady's eyes widened.

"Let go of me!"

He struggled to tug his arm out of their hold, but Eve had done this with only two upper limbs available before and they knew the human's strength. Their third arm came up to clasp long, spindly fingers around Arkady's other wrist and pinned him against the wall, and then they touched his neck with one of their free hands, revelling in the quick, frantic beat of the human's pulse. 

"Get off me! Get off- Fucking _get off me!_ "

Eve dragged both his arms above his head so they'd only need one hand to hold his wrists together. The second came down to the human's shoulder to pull him closer. Arkady's breathing pattern hitched, instantly turned ragged. 

"Let go, Eve! Let-"

Arkady choked on his words when Eve's fingers tightened slightly around his neck. The pale skin there was hot and clammy. Sweat beaded all along the man's hairline, his heart thumped loudly, his wrists trembled in Eve's grasp. Wonderfully predictable and satiating waves of panic spilled and billowed in the thin space between them. Eve took a moment to appreciate the fact that they'd found a prey which so easily allowed feeding in delicious quality and abundance. They felt their scales tighten and retract in relief all along their body, and though their teeth and claws throbbed with the need to plunge and dig, their hunger finally started to slowly abate. 

"Stop, let go," Arkady said in a strangled whisper. "Please, Eve-"

 _"Not hurting you,"_ Eve said. _"Only fear."_

Arkady fell silent. His body remained tense and shivering beneath Eve but his wet eyes soon stopped pleading and went distant instead. He didn't react when his tears were licked away. Eve had seen this behavior in preys which didn't get killed immediately, but it didn't make the taste go bad so they didn't care when this happened. They continued feeding on the unreactive human for a while. When Eve had eventually had their fill, they let go of the human's wrists and pulled away. Arkady slumped against the wall without a sound.

 _"Good. You are useful for this,"_ appreciatively said Eve. They figured now was as good a time as any to correct the human's mistaken attitude, so they decided to explain to him what he'd done wrong earlier so that he wouldn't do it again. _"And you are useful for the ship. But selfishness is bad, too dangerous for the pack. You do things like everyone else, listen to leader, not disobey. Or the pack becomes weak. You understand?"_

Arkady had slid to the ground and was hugging himself, legs hiked up, body still shaking, emptily staring at the floor. 

Eve leaned down so he would look them in the face. _"You understand?"_

The human's hazy blue gaze flickered to the black spots on Eve's skull that emulated eyes and he nodded absently. Satisfied, Eve bumped their head against the human's to show their approval before standing back up and leaving. It was a funny thing to have a prey as one of his pack, as small as this group was, but guiding a wayward packmate back on the right track like Eve had just done with Arkady felt a little bit like home.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey pumpkin!  
> Come by and say hi on [Tumblr](https://lost-tanuki-tales.tumblr.com/post/612320046092599296/masterlist-oneshot-prompt-challenge) (link to my Prompts masterlist), and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/losttanuki)!
> 
> I also have a Discord server called the Pumpkin Patch server, you can pm me on Tumblr/Twitter to join. I'm looking forward to seeing you there!


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